


no better hope

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [179]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Fingon is...there's no one better, Fingon the Valiant, Flashbacks, Folklore, Gen, Irish Language, Irish Mythology - Freeform, Mount Diablo, POV Alternating, Thangorodrim, expect copious flashbacks to everything that ran before, expect violence and discussions of torture and peril, not alternating between characters alternating between persons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:09:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22287661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: “Thus began our longest journey together.” – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Relationships: Aredhel & Fingon | Findekáno, Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë & Fingon | Findekáno, Fingon | Findekáno & Fingon's Wife, Fingon | Findekáno & Finrod Felagund | Findaráto, Fingon | Findekáno & Gandalf | Mithrandir, Fingon | Findekáno & Gwindor, Fingon | Findekáno & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fingon | Findekáno & Sons of Fëanor, Fingon | Findekáno & Turgon of Gondolin, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [179]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 113
Kudos: 54





	1. truth and justice he loved

The darkness was absolute. There were doves, muttering to one another beneath their restless wings, and there was (if one listened carefully) the breath of the horses on the other side of the wall. Fingon could hear his own breath, too. His own pulse.

A match, struck, was thrillingly bright. It blossomed, casting just enough of a glow that the hand holding it was limned in fire-warmth.

The voice that spoke rang clear. The voice, like the hand, was somehow both mobile and steady.

_“Who spreads light in the gathering on the hills?_

_Who can tell the ages of the moon?_

_Who can tell the place where the sun rests?”_

Fingon let out another breath. The match was quenched. Darkness again, but he felt the loss of light all the more keenly, for having seen a little. Then three more matches burned, high and dangerous in the haymow,

( _Athair, we promise, we shall dampen the floor all around—_ )

…and into three lanterns traveled the three small fires. Now light blazed in earnest.

Here was Maedhros, not like himself at all. He had combed his hair to make it stand out in wild rays, and he had painted his face in red and gold, to look something like the sun.

“ _An Dagda_ ,” he intoned, as the lanterns trembled beside him (held, perhaps, by hands less steady than his own). “The great god, the horseman, the all-father am I. Behold the _lorg mór_!” And the thumping, as of a staff upon the wide rafters, sounded out. “Behold the _uaithne_!” Here, the strains of a harp carried deliciously down from on high. “I alone can lead my people. Hear and heed me!”

Fingon thought, then, to look at Uncle Feanor. Hardly any glow reached the faces of his aunt and uncle, seated, as he was, on kitchen chairs in an even row of Caranthir’s making. All the same, he could see that his uncle was smiling. A glint was on his teeth.

The serpentine fall of a rope, black and quite mysterious in shadow, caught Fingon’s attention once again. It dangled, and then it swayed and _jerked_ , as two ragged gremlins slipped down it, gibbering.

“Lord,” Aunt Nerdanel whispered loudly, eliciting a twitter of laughter from the mow that was just as quickly hushed.

“Behold,” _An Dagda_ cried. “The _Fomóire_ , the Fomorians _._ They come from under sea and under earth. Cursed and twisted! They are hideous and doomed.”

Fingon knew that the Fomorians, based on size alone, were Celegorm and Curufin. But now the barn doors creaked, and the harp leapt up as the doors slid partway open, drawn by an unseen hand. Moonlight came through, to mingle silver-shine with gold, and the dancing Fomorians were fierce indeed.

“Their king is called Balor,” _An Dagda_ explained. “His eye is monstrous and slays with a single glance. Who dares look upon him?”

Screams in the darkness, as Celegorm stumped about the barn floor, cackling, suggested that none did.

“But lo!” _An Dagda_ swept a wide circle with his arm. Copper pennies shimmered as they fell, tinkling. “There is another race upon this sainted isle. Did you think only that the underseas, the undergrounds, would hold this domain! Not so, not so!”

“Not so!” called Uncle Feanor, pounding the heels of his boots against the floor.

_An Dagda_ cleared his throat deferentially. “We see that all are in agreement.” He thumped the staff that Fingon could now see in his hand—the _lorg mór_ , it had been called—and said, “Hail the _Tuath Dé_! Hail the tribe of gods!”

The twins, wearing twisted vines upon their curly hair, held the lanterns close up under their faces.

“Their king was troubled,” _An Dagda_ said. How could his kindly voice fall so sad, thought Fingon, clenching his fingers against his knees. When Maedhros—but it _wasn’t_ Maedhros, he couldn’t even think of him so, when he held power like this. His voice filled the air and the light that touched him filled all else. “Darkness overpowered his people.”

The Ambarussa set down their lanterns, very slow and careful, and then they too climbed down the ropes.

After a brief pause, the harp took up a low and lilting song again.

“Their king could not fight, because he had lost an arm. His son was half-Fomorian. Bres was his name. So ill did he rule that his father Nuada had an arm of silver made, and ruled again as best he could.” _An Dagda_ lifted his voice. “How did he rule?”

The _Tuath Dé_ and the Fomorians answered, “Not well!”

“Not well.” _An Dagda_ began to pace, so that his tunic fluttered. His tunic did not even reach his knees; this was a concession, Fingon suspected, because of the risk of fire. Even Mae— _An Dagda_ would consider practical matters. Likely he had been _especially_ concerned.

There was another interlude of harp music, and then the eerie scrape of metal, dragged.

“Who comes?”

“It is I,” said Caranthir, very stiffly and very much himself. “Lug.”

The Fomorians snickered.

“Whom do you serve, Lug?” _An Dagda_ inquired, peering down from his high perch.

“My people,” Caranthir answered, trying to heft the fire-poker he carried with him so that it swished with the same grand effect of a sword. “Who—who don’t—who shall not be ruled by those under the water or under the earth.”

“Fight bravely, Lug,” _An Dagda_ said, with an encouraging smile on his sun-smeared face.

Oh, how the battle raged! The harp was silent, likely because its invisible master was needed for tricks of lighting. Fingon ground his teeth with excitement. Both the Ambarussa fell under the piercing eye of Balor, who held up a mirror, catching the light of a particular lantern, at important moments. Lug swung his poker bravely, but the other Fomorian snatched it from his hands—

“Ow, Curufin!”

—and the leader of the god-tribe’s army sprawled on the floor. Balor loomed.

Fingon chanced another glance at Uncle Feanor, but found him to be deep in thought.

“Do be careful, please,” Aunt Nerdanel interjected.

“Darkness unto darkness. Fear unto failure.” _An Dagda_ sighed deeply, as if he was in pain. “Where now, my doughty Lug? Where will you find courage—”

“Here in my pocket!” shouted Lug triumphantly, for Caranthir was Lug at last, and he threw something…an apple, maybe…into Balor’s face.

“You little _rat_ ,” said Balor, and _An Dagda_ interrupted hastily, “Balor _fell_ ,” so that Balor did.

“Three cheers for Lug!” cried the Ambarussa, who had been playing dead very patiently. They leapt up and danced about, waggling their fingers in disdain at the fallen Fomorians.

“Vengeance…be…mine…” Balor groaned, and went limp, resigned to the elegance of death.

“ _Filleann an feall ar an bhfeallaire_ ,” _An Dagda_ proclaimed. “The bad deed returns on the bad-deed doer!”

“You needn’t have translated,” Uncle Feanor scolded, standing up to clap loudly. Aunt Nerdanel tugged at his sleeve.

“Dearest, they’re not finished yet.”

“Consider our bold players!” _An Dagda_ laid down his staff and gathered a lantern in each hand. “Here is our harpist, who coaxes us to vision in song. And here is Balor, whose eye was pierced by Lug’s thrown stone, and here are the soldiers who stood for each side! All together, lads!”

And as one, they chanted, as Fingon’s heart surged with affectionate envy,

“How the Feanorians beat the Fomorians!”

_Filleann an feall ar an bhfeallaire._

“Fingon,” Aredhel says. “If you need help, call for one of us. It’s hard enough, to move so many.”

He pauses, ashamed, turning the scalpel in his hand. It rusted badly in the long winter, and though he was able to salvage the blade and its keen edge, he uses it only for bandages now. “I will be ready in a moment.”

She does not let him off so easily. Her dark braid—falling to her waist, if she doesn’t wind and coil it in a chignon as she often does—swings against her shoulder like a cat’s uneasy tail.

“It will take us a day from here,” she says. “Even with this lot.”

“One more hard road.”

“Ha.”

FIngon has seen so much in these months—this long, long over-year. He fastens the strap of his surgeon’s bag and hoists it over his shoulder. “Estrela’s friends have assured her comfort to the best of their knowledge,” he says, “But I will see if she will not take a little more tonic, I think.”

“What do you think their faces will be like,” she asks, in a fast-paced, running-horse sort of voice. “When they see us?”

“He will be afraid,” Fingon says, quiet and bitter. “I know that much.”

“And I was not only speaking of Maedhros,” Aredhel answers. “ _I_ know that much.”

Sometimes he wishes that his sister did not know him so well. But it is the same with Turgon; the three of them, and their father, must know each other perfectly now, for no one else is left.

_Not true_ , his heart whispers in the deep. Finrod and Galadriel survived as well, burying and mourning beside their dark-haired, dark-fated kin, all the while living with fierceness and light. Then, too, they have made new friends; Haleth, and her companions, who found them in frozen-fleshed despair…and so many others, hopeful men and women who yet believe in the promises of the west.

Fingon is a world away from the boy who tried to save a man’s life, by cutting off his hand.

“Estrela,” he says again. Behind him, a few of the freed slaves—he must learn their names, and not think of them by the terms of their old bondage—are taking down the last of the makeshift tents.

He finds his most urgent charge astride a horse, with Maria behind her. Estrela has better color in her cheeks than she had when Fingon spooned thin broth between her lips, but she is still pale with exhaustion—and grief.

Fingon has lost enough loves. Maybe that is why, no matter how he guides his hands to steadiness (thinking not of Argon’s face), and no matter how he acknowledges that death can harm him and yet must not be feared (thinking not of his mother), he still stops short for others’ sorrows.

_Russandol_.

As if the name, unspoken, called him, Gwindor brushes by. Estrela sees him; she turns her head to and fro a great deal, to see freely with one eye.

“The children?”

“They are with Beren,” Wachiwi calls, from where she and Wister are redistributing extra weapons to able-bodied newcomers. Haleth must be with his father, thinks Fingon. Fingolfin and Finrod and Haleth: there are the appointed leaders.

His father does not—burden him—with too much—

“Beren?” Gwindor asks. Gwindor is a shaggy, weather-beaten man, who looks like a wolf or an eagle: two very different things, perhaps, but both sharp-eyed, wild, wary. Maybe Fingon has been listening to Finrod too much, or Wachiwi, who loves to tell myths around the fire.

“He is a good man,” Fingon says, since he is closest. “He will look after them well.”

Gwindor looks at him. The Fingon of two years ago—less than that, even—would quail. This Fingon will never quail again, for any man. Not even thrice-cursed Bauglir himself. “If you were like to be cruel you’d have done it already,” Gwindor says. “I’ll own to that. But nor can I—trust kindness, so soon. Those children are—”

“Safe.” Fingon says. “I know it is difficult to believe, but they _are_ safe with us. As much as anyone can be. You’ve met Haleth. You’ve met my father. Now, when he was a businessman of New York, I suppose there were many people who didn’t think much of overlooking him. I certainly didn’t. I was a foolish, upstart child. But they would lay down their lives for this camp. That includes all of you. And believe me, sir, their lives are strongly held.”

The corners of Gwindor’s eyes crease. His mouth remains stony. Still, it might be the remnant of a smile…a pained and incredulous one, but a smile nonetheless.

“You talk a fairy story, doctor.”

“No,” Fingon answers, keeping pace with him as they approach Estrela’s side. “No, I’m afraid all of my fairy stories are old ashes, now.”

They set out before the sun reaches halfway up the sky. If this is late autumn, here, Fingon will welcome it for all eternity. The wind snaps against his skin when the land is wide-open, but the air does not freeze in his lungs. A light snow fell in the night, but it is melting under the sunshine.

Since there are not enough horses for all to ride, the weak and weary are put upon them, along with a few sentries, and Haleth, who leads them at the head of the whole party. Aredhel and Turgon and Galadriel are walking together, mingling with the rescued children. None of the children are younger than the small boy who returned with Gwindor; none of them are small enough to be Idril’s age. Still, Turgon must ache for her.

Turgon must always ache.

Fingon is keeping busy, in his own mind, with cataloging who shall next need his services, and when. There were burns and abrasions, and a bullet or knife wound here and there, from the skirmish that Haleth came upon in the foothills.

“ _A labor-camp,_ ” Haleth said. “ _We did not leave until we were certain it would burn to the ground._ ”

Fingon has known of slavery since childhood. His father explained it, as he explained many things: quietly and thoroughly, with a gravity which Fingon had then mistaken for indifference. Finrod was the one to introduce him to the heated pamphlets, the backdoor meetings of real abolitionists.

Even in the north, politeness was given greater deference than shared humanity.

When Fingon _was_ polite, which he wasn’t, always, it was out of a sense of morality, not embarrassment. Sometimes it was the right thing to do; often not. Perhaps that was why he had been drawn like a moth to flame by the wild and radiant Formenos cousins, who treated all but their own father’s rules as subject to themselves.

He didn’t have to be told that the camp Haleth found was a slave camp; no one did. The men and women there, even aside from Estrela, bore roping scars across their shoulders, had ribs thin with hunger and hands mangled by thankless toil. Every one of them but the children had an iron shackle weighing down one ankle.

That had been the first order of business, once they had a settled camp on the open valley grassland, down away from the foothills and the distant smoke wafting from two directions. Turgon, who had an innate practical sense of what would serve them and what wouldn’t, had taken a railroad hammer or two and a stake as spoils from the skirmish. All this, before he had any idea that they would be needed—or for what.

Even Gwindor let them strike his shackle off before he set off, though it was almost an afterthought.

Gwindor wanted— _all_ he wanted—was to seek his Russandol.

Fingon does not know—much. In the busy order of his doctoring, in the deepest confines of his mind, he is beginning to wonder if he only _wants_ to know because such interest is a distraction from what he knows already, but does not wish to remember.

(There are too many sights and sounds, too many threads of laughter and conversation. Everything about _him_ was memorable, down to his rich, earnest, lying voice.)

When the sun reaches midday, Haleth halts for a meal. She doesn't have to, but she is bluntly generous when she can be. Fingon is not certain that she even knows this about herself.

The men and women who have walked and ridden with gaunt and weary faces turn those same faces now to her. Fingon crosses the knotted crowd to where Estrela is slumped forward, exhaustion causing her to strain against Maria's arms.

"How are you feeling, ma'am?"

Estrela blinks her one dark eye. Her cropped hair clings damply to her forehead and her neck. All the other women from the compound have hair like that, kept almost as short as the men's. It makes Fingon almost self-conscious of his own, grown long and rippling, marked by the bright threads that Haleth's people had gifted him. Hair matters to people as much as clothing and jewelry does; probably more. He remembers how gentle Doctor Olorin always was with young female fever patients, who wept when they woke to find their heads shorn like schoolboys’.

Fingon had been attentive to Doctor Olorin’s moods as well as his methods. There was much to be learned from both. The man did nothing by accident; he was too busy and too old for that, he said. He showed patience to anyone softhearted, anyone very young or very old. He had no use for the rich and powerful.

Fingon wanted to believe that he himself could do the same.

He gives Estrela water and tells her that the children are eating; he saw them crouched beside Beren, to whom they have taken a kind of liking.

“Thank you,” she says. She must mumble, because whoever scarred her face cut her lips open almost to her ears, but Fingon can tell that she is trying to say each word carefully.

A white wave of fury overtakes him. Not the first he has felt, in this life or in these months or in these last few days, even, but it is enough to remind him how much he must save rage for those who have earned it.

(Fingon tries to imagine the sort of beast who would try to make another of a woman, and finds that he cannot.)

“You are too quiet.”

They have finished eating. They are moving again, through a wide valley that has the mountain at their back like a door to heaven.

No: that cannot be true. That mountain means only death.

Fingon shifts the leather strap of his satchel to rest more comfortably against his shoulder. He has been doing this for three thousand miles; more than that.

“Have I ever been too quiet, cousin?” he says at last, in answer to Finrod.

Finrod wears not only thread in his fair hair; he wears beads. He has worn them in Fingon’s sight since a day in April, eighteen months ago, when he came to dine.

“We are five, maybe six hours away from our family.” Finrod shrugs. He would look careless, but for the hard line of his mouth. “I know it is weighing on me. I can only imagine how much it is weighing on _you_.”

There is the white fury again, and then grief in its turn like a tolling bell, striking and striking and ringing until it fills every inch of him, his ribcage a cathedral, his heart pummeled by bronze and iron.

“We have spoken of this.”

“Your anger, yes.”

Perhaps Finrod’s tone is a shade incredulous. Perhaps it isn’t. Fingon grinds his teeth all the same. “You don’t believe me, after all this? At the very edge—”

“I know you are angry.” But Finrod must be goading him; he wouldn’t have prodded at Fingon’s silence, otherwise.

“Do you think he’ll sneer, like his father will? If he does, I’ll know he’s weak at the knees. He can—can hide behind Feanor and Celegorm all he likes, pretending to give them brave, wise counsel. Or he can show himself as the barbarian he may like to be now. Mocking us for our rough looks, boasting of his—his kills and his w-women—” Fingon draws himself up, because he is stuttering. It is an old habit, one he set aside in adolescence. Not one that has seemed at all close, in the gravity of their wild life.

Also, he does not want anyone else to hear.

Finrod taps thoughtfully with one finger on the curve of his bow. Like Fingon’s satchel, it is slung over his shoulder.

“I am sorry,” Finrod says, his mouth drawn still tighter. “I am angry too.”

Fingon swallows hard. Tears, when there is no danger of frostbite, are not ignoble. Not weak. He has seen his father weep. More than that—he held his father, after their losses, and his father has held him.

Still: he will not weep for—

“We all are,” Fingon says, as bravely as he can. “We are all angry, and we have carried that anger like a fire to warm us, all this long way.”

Beren is carving a path towards them, through the milling throng. Fingon will have to be a man again, not a younger cousin. Finrod says, low and piercing,

“Are you afraid you will find him so changed, as you described?”

Fingon does not look at him. He looks straight ahead. “I am afraid I shall find him just as he was.”

(When he was newly thirteen, he spent three weeks at Formenos. He was frightened of everything there—the way the floorboards creaked at night, the searing scent of the forge, hotheaded Celegorm and crafty Curufin. He could admit none of this; he was supposed to be as good as a grown man (he thought)).

Maedhros prayed the Gaelic with him, Maedhros saved him from Celegorm’s wrath—over a well-earned pair of mud-drenched boots—and Maedhros taught him how to tend to growing things.)

There is a town on the horizon. Haleth sends Ames, and Fingolfin offers to go with Fingon.

“I think it best that you not be recognized,” Finrod points out. “The resemblance is strong. We have no idea, how much mischief…”

“Feanor has made?” Somehow, Fingon reflects, his father has found a way to say the name easily. Or maybe it only sounds that way, and really, it tolls like a bell in him, too.

In the end, it is agreed that Beren and Finrod shall go instead. Fingon is surprised that Turgon does not so much as offer. He is standing to the side of their little council, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.

_But of course_ , Fingon reflects, as they strike out east, for the smoke-plumed stovepipes. _He fears I will go soft. He is readying his own anger._

Turgon need not worry on one account: Fingon will not relent. Fingon held to softness for so long, until half his own family was dead. Now, like Olorin, he saves it for the helpless, gentle, innocent folk.

On their way, Finrod converses with Ames, who has tucked her straw-colored curls up under her hat. Fingon hangs back with Beren. The mountain is—almost out of sight, now. Not that it is far, but the hills and valleys have let the land shield it.

The town feels like just as great a threat as the railroad outpost did, under the lowering peak. For a single, mad moment, Fingon half-expects to see the unmistakable long-legged gait and copper head of the one who has earned his rage, here in the dusty streets.

But he doesn’t see anyone he knows.

“Let us not be seen asking questions,” Finrod suggests, quietly. “Let _them_ question us.”

The townspeople—mostly working men, and a few harried women who look as they do not know quite what to do by day—give them a wide berth. No questions, then.

Beren wrinkles his brow. In his quiet, steady way, he observes, “These people are afraid.”

Beren is young—younger than Fingon, if Fingon had to guess. Exact dates have never mattered. Fingon knows that he was Finrod’s friend when Finrod was finding and losing his way across the country.

When Fingon was studying under Doctor Olorin, and losing so much else he thought he had beside him. 

There is a public house. Finrod nods towards it and they follow single-file. Fingon has a hand on his gun. Fingon has killed, and must know that he will kill again, if needed.

Only if needed. That is on his honor.

_We are not the same._

_Filleann an feall ar an bhfeallaire._

Fingon’s hatred of taverns is visceral, deep-rooted. Still, he follows Finrod through the swinging saloon doors. He knows Finrod is warier than a wildcat, but he doesn’t look it; Finrod never does.

The barkeep blanches at the sight of them, then recovers himself, swiping a grey cloth down the length of scarred wood.

Grey, too, are the rough but distinctly similar uniforms of the men crowded around one of the larger tables.

“Soldiers,” Finrod murmurs.

“ _Yrch_ ,” Ames corrects him, knowingly.

That is Haleth’s word for the mercenaries whom she has encountered in the past. That they are in Bauglir’s pay is well-known to people who know anything about Bauglir.

Fingon—should have known _more_ , sooner.

They expected to find the _yrch_ in great numbers at the railroad, but instead they found rough, drunken workers who shot on sight, but were swiftly routed.

Fingon pushes away the memory of his father’s face and how it looked when he set fire to the makings of Bauglir’s far-stretched hand. Pushes away the memory of how his own heart had pounded, proud and angry, when they tore the shanties down for kindling wood.

He was not lying to Finrod, about being angry.

He was not lying to Gwindor, when he spoke of ashes.

They seat themselves. The board table is stained, as have been all the tables at which Fingon has sat, when they still passed through towns. He learned terrible things at places like this saloon.

Without being asked, the barkeep brings them red wine.

This is confusing.

After a moment, one of the _yrch_ leaves his fellows and shuffles, with hesitant steps, to join them.

“Pa...pardon,” he says, twisting his soldier’s cap in his hands. “Are you fur-trappers?”

Fingon looks at Finrod. Finrod shrugs, as Finrod can, elegantly and without care. Finrod is not like—Finrod’s pretenses of power are not those of fire and magnetism. Rather, he becomes aloof and cold. It is not like him at all, but at least Fingon _knows_ it is a lie.

The man clears his throat. “Are you...” he asks very carefully, “French?”

It is a strange question. But Fingon, sensing that the threat is sought rather than brandished, nods. “ _Oui_ ,” he answers, his mother’s accent burning in his ears. “ _Et pourquoi_?”

The man turns greyer than his coat. He actually bows. It is a strange sight in the west. Stranger still, from a soldier. “E-enjoy your meal,” he says, glancing hastily between the four of them as if hoping that one of them will have a gentle face.

Then he rejoins his companions.

“That was odd,” Beren says, in a low voice.

“Very,” Finrod agrees. “Ames, do you know what he meant?”

Ames shakes her head. “I don’t. I’ve met French fur-trappers... _Québécois_. I never had reason to fear them.”

Finrod’s lips settle in their hard-thinking line. Then he speaks again. “Well,” he says. “They seem to fear us. Perhaps we can use that.”

It is no wonder, why Finrod has been a support to the survivors of Fingolfin’s band, and more to the man himself.

Fingon’s talent, in their old set, was only being Maedhros’ favorite. He can see that now. He learned that, without knowing he was learning, in the savage winter, and yes, in the savage months before that. What he has had to offer is humble and steady, and he has had to work for it. Nothing can be truly given, if it is not earned.

He used to love such proud, unsteady things.

_Have a care_ , he warns himself, as he rises to follow his cousin’s subtly beckoning hand. _You nearly broke earlier this very day. Weakness can never be strength, or wisdom itself, if you think it is._

Finrod leads them to the bar.

“The wine,” he says, heavily French—“it is very good.”

“I’m glad,” mumbles their host.

Finrod smiles thinly. It makes him look frightening; a rugged god with the delicate beads in shining hair. “You know us. Our kind.”

A nod. The man is as frightened as a rabbit.

“ _Celui_ - _ci_...” Finrod gestures to Fingon. “This one here. He speak only his own. But he understand much.”

“Very good, sir.”

Finrod says, tapping his blunt nails against the wood, as he tapped one finger against his bow hours before, “Tell me, which way is...Mithrim?”

“My people had a saying,” Beren says, when the town is behind them and their waiting companions, hidden by hills and brave, brushy trees, are ahead. Fingon noticed the first time that Beren spoke of his people that he did so in past tense. He had to. The Erchamion are all dead, but for him. “How men should not hate wolves, though they fear them. They should only hate men who are also wolves.”

“Those men in the tavern.” Finrod frowns. “They were not wolves.”

“No.” Fingon squints up at the sky; it is afternoon. How many hours will it be, now? How many—“They thought that we were.”

They hurry; they are losing light.

“We’re not far,” Finrod says.

Haleth nods. “Didn’t think so. No, we know this Feanor fellow may be unfriendly, when you arrive. Anyone not ready for arms had best hang back.”

Fingon watches his father. In the gold shafts of light that come down over the mountains and plains, his father’s hair is very grey. He still keeps it cut almost neatly. Aredhel cuts it for him. Yet, time betrays him. The winter frosted it—Argon’s death—Mother’s death—

“You are right,” Fingolfin answers. “Feanor is not to be trusted. But we cannot turn from our path.”

“I know that about you.” Haleth nods, firmly. She does not smile, but that does not mean very much because Haleth almost never smiles. “I have known it since we clawed you out of a snowbank, Fingolfin son of Finwe the Irishman.”

She likes to call him that sometimes.

Fingolfin does smile. Still, Fingon can tell when his father is pained, even though he spent many wasted years pretending _not_ to know, or care. “You continue to be very kind to us, Haleth, chieftain of the Haladin.”

They begin to move. The horses plodding, the people milling, the sun setting. Fingon can hear voices rising and falling. There is, surprisingly, laughter. Beren and Aredhel are keeping company with the children. He sees Galadriel there, too.

Then he sees his father falling into step beside him. The land has changed; they are following a road, now. There are more trees, dividing up the rise and fall of ground like border-walls.

“Father?”

“May I ask you something?”

It has been a long time since he heard that stiff hesitance in Fingolfin’s voice. Fingon, despite himself, flushes. He knows what his father will say:

_Will you choose them—_ him— _over us?_

“I—” He remembers that he is a man. He remembers that he _must not forget that_. “Yes, Father.”

They do not stop their progress. There ahead is Wachiwi, and there is the horse that carries Estrela. There is Gwindor, moving like a man who has had the strings of his soul cut. There is Silas, and Wister, and many whose names Fingon does not know or does not yet recall—

“Will you try and stop me from doing anything reckless?” his father asks, very quietly.

Fingon stops, then.

“I—you—” He puts one foot in front of the other, because they haven’t time. They haven’t much time at all. “Father, are you afraid of doing something reckless?”

“I am afraid I shall hurl myself at my brother.” His father sighs, his chin dipping towards his chest. “I am afraid I shall—say so many cruel and vicious things, dashing all hope that we may reconcile.”

“But you do wish to reconcile?” Fingon can scarcely breathe.

“Not here, on this sunlit road. Not…not _then_ , in the ice and snow. But sometimes—when I think of all we might have had—” He turns and looks at his son.

_I am all he has_ , Fingon thinks, knowing as he does so that it isn’t true, but feeling that it is.

He had expected his father to fear recklessness from _him_.

“I will not leave your side,” Fingon says. “Not for a moment.”

The river finds them again at the gates of Mithrim.

There is a bridge. (Of course there is a bridge.)

To the left, the river falls away into a lake. There is a hill behind the fort. There is a field beyond the lake.

“The bridge is fucking _steel_ ,” Galadriel scoffs, and no one tells her to mind her tongue. Though it is still far off—too far to see if anyone stands upon it—it glitters in the sun.

Fingon searches desperately in himself for the white rage, but it doesn’t come.

“It looks unguarded,” Wister says.

Fingolfin shakes his head, and Haleth says, “It isn’t.”

A howl rises in the air; loud and full and almost joyous. Fingon’s heart, were it to do its own bidding, would pitch forward to the earth before his feet.

“ _Huan_ ,” Aredhel breathes, her face twisted in agony. For a moment it seems as if, because they halt, the whole company shall.

“Onward,” Fingolfin orders, and Fingon takes up his father’s command.

“Onward.”

(See—if he worshiped as a babe, and hero-praised as a boy, and shared a brother-bond after that—

What is he to do with all of it? What is he to do, with his pitched-forward heart?)

They reach the bridge. No sign of Huan. Smoke rises from the fort beyond, but there is not a soul to be seen. The bridge is forged of steel and the fort is build of stone. Nothing, then, that can be burned or easily broken.

_Unguarded_ , Fingon thinks, but thinks it only of himself.

Then peace is past: the rushes by the river quiver, and bowmen rise. Bowmen and gunmen both; they are as mingled of face and hair and cloth as are Haleth’s people.

One of them is…almost tall enough. One of them is— _familiar_ , with golden hair down his shoulders, and a sun-browned face as steely as the bridge he climbs and holds. 

Fingon always thought he hated Celegorm. Now he knows that he missed him. Missed him, and must continue missing him, because his cousin is so changed.

If Celegorm knows them, he does not show it. Or maybe this is him, showing it.

“We will wait,” Haleth says, calm, and in an undertone. It is not her fight; it is not her destination. Fingolfin looks back, to see that his children follow him.

Fingon cannot remember a time that he ever saw Feanor do the same.

They do not walk in a file. They are not going to try to cross the bridge. Fingolfin and Fingon walk abreast, and Finrod with them, and Turgon and Aredhel and Galadriel walk behind them.

Four men, two women—there are no girls, here—against a line of bullets and arrows. Against Celegorm, and the hound who has come to join him; the hound who called.

(Does Huan—remember them?)

“Celegorm,” Fingolfin (Father) says. His voice does not sound reckless. It does not sound weary, either. It is crisp and polite. “I have come to speak to your father.”

Celegorm remains expressionless. Aredhel drags in a breath through her nose (she is just behind Fingon, so he can hear her), and Fingon reminds himself that it is not only he who has a cousin to lose in loving.

The sun is blazing golden and orange, and Celegorm is still not speaking.

Huan speaks for him, in a way. He bounds forward, over the bridge, the nails of his great paws tap-tapping on the metal, and then he hurls himself quite gleefully, at Fingon.

“Huan!” barks Celegorm, more sharply than the hound ever would. Huan, halfway finished bathing Fingon’s cheek and ear with a lathered tongue, yelps and falls back.

Fingon feels the loss of him. There is something so reassuring, about a creature that only knows how to be simple and true.

“Celegorm,” Fingolfin says again. “We did not come for a fight. But I will speak to my brother.”

Celegorm, with his hand on Huan’s head, says, in a strange voice, “I think you had better speak to mine. He is coming.”

Fingon—

Should have known more.

Maglor, coming down from the hill-fort, with his hair bedraggled about his ears and his skin white as milk, might have told him by looks alone. Perhaps to Turgon or Aredhel, or even to his father, Maglor’s arrival seemed like a mockery. Perhaps to Finrod, it was a grief beyond what Fingon could feel, then.

Finrod would feel, as Fingon ought, that Maglor should not look like this, wan and thin and hard and breaking.

Fingon had seen people die before. He had seen his mother die, and Argon die. But in those wretched moments, death had come so quickly. Even if life lingered for hours, death tore and wrenched and held forever.

Maglor looked as though he had been dying for a long time. Or did Fingon not love him enough to feel death’s swiftness?

Did Fingon not love—enough—

There is a change, not in the wind, but in the air. Behind them are Haleth and all the others. They have retreated to a safe distance. Ahead are the blank stares of men and women with weapons to greet them.

Celegorm waits for Maglor without patience, only stillness. He steps aside and makes room for his brother, yet they might as well be two strangers.

A lighter-hearted Fingon would say that this, at least, has not changed.

(But everything has.)

Afterwards, Fingon will feel…guilt? Or regret. One of the aching two. He will feel the weight of some wrong on his part, for perceiving the news of his uncle’s death only as a lens through which to look for Maedhros. Is it because his own father does not stir? Does not cry out?

“Feanor is dead?” Fingolfin asks, at last.The bells are ringing in his voice; in the cage of grief that his body makes.

(Fingon will think also of that, afterwards.)

“Our father died six months ago,” Maglor says. _His_ voice is a dry, cracked filter of its former glory.

(Yes, Fingon loved Maglor’s voice. Did not they all?)

(He didn’t think the west would take so much. He never dreamed, in his foolish city boyhood, of any of _this_.)

“It does not especially concern you.” That is Celegorm, and he is colder than winter, as most people know it.

“Oh, blast you and your damn father!” Turgon sputters, losing his long-held, much-wronged temper. Finrod, who has been silent, swings on his heel and claps a hand on his shoulder.

“Turgon. Not now.”

That, in turn, shakes Fingon from whatever stupor he has found himself in.

_Oh,_ whispers the wind, which has not changed. _You should have known._

“Maglor,” he says, taking a half-step forward, so that the guns and arrows are trained on him. “Christ, Maglor, it’s _us_. Don’t you—doesn’t Maitimo—”

He had meant to say Maedhros. Or, more to the point, he had not meant to speak a name at all. 

The whole world would have ended whether he did or not, of course. Time is like that. Death is like that. And Maglor, lifting his head, and not heeding brutish Celegorm, or stiff Fingolfin, looks Fingon straight in the eye with a gaze so wild that _grief_ can hardly touch it, and Maglor says—


	2. on a time the friend

Snow lay on his eyelids, and under his eyelids, and in his mouth. It was soft, even tender. He was _surprised_ , that the cold could do that.

Fingon’s first feeling _was_ surprise.

If this was death, it hadn’t the horror he’d feared. Of course, his faith taught him that death wasn’t something to be feared at all, not for the pure of heart—

“Mama?” he called, but he knew, before the name had left him, that she would not reply.

No moment passed; he did not have to bear the unbearable.

“Hullo, _cano_ ,” said Maedhros—Maitimo, oh, thank all the saints, he was still Maitimo. “Thought I’d lost you. You aren’t allowed to look so limp and pale!”

Of course. Fingon knew, now, where he had awoken. He was in Valinor Park, and it was snowing, frosting the window-ledges like the pillowed layers of a cake. His throat and his heart hurt him; he remembered that.

He was _remembering_.

“I…”

“Don’t try to talk,” Maitimo soothed. “I’ll fetch a little more flannel for your throat. _Mamaí_ says it’s just the thing. Must be red, though. It isn’t proper flannel if it isn’t red.”

Fingon had called for _his_ mother, just now. He flushed. “I can talk,” he murmured. His throat didn’t hurt _very_ badly. He was believing it worse than it was. At fifteen? Yes, at fifteen, such things oughtn’t matter. “I’m afraid I may have said—”

“You needn’t apologize for calling for your mother,” Maitimo said, with the sweetest of all his smiles. “Lord and Lady know I’ve years of that yet ahead.” He whisked away, his long dressing gown—black-watch, not violet and silken like Maglor’s—flying out behind him. “I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, though the lambs I’ve known don’t do more than waggle theirs.”

Fingon lay still among the sheets. He was shivering, not quite sure that the snow would stay where it belonged, on the outside of the sturdy-walled house. The snow had not done his bidding, of late. Nothing—nothing had.

His head had an ugly, sick feeling hanging about the nose and mouth. His eyes prickled. Nonetheless, he was comfortable here. Comfortable, and so very, very glad that Maitimo would be back beside him soon.

One had to be grateful for such things. One had to hold onto them with all possible might.

Fingon shut his eyes.

“I’ve brought you some broth,” Maitimo said. The featherbed shifted as he sat down on the edge of it, tucking one knee up. “It’s just the thing. Now drink up, and I’ll amuse you.”

“Is this…the sort…”

“Of broth that you make for me? Not half as good, I’m afraid. We can’t all be chefs of a high order.”

Fingon smiled. He was all puffed and aching, he knew, but he couldn’t withhold a smile. “I didn’t mean _that_ , Maitimo. I meant—is this the sort of sickness that needs a doctor?”

“I already called ours, though the snow will make him a little belated. Your father has been alerted, too. I sent a servant who wouldn’t be frightened by the weather.”

“I have a father, still,” Fingon said, wondering. That was wrong; he hadn’t said—that—

“Of course you have a father,” Maitimo said gently. His hair looked darker than usual, but that would be the candlelight. The candles burned long yet low, in this room. “So have I. Drink, Fingon.”

(The answers now were not what they had been.)

Fingon drank the broth anyway. It was better than anything he had ever made. He hadn’t, however, Maitimo’s taste.

“Would you sketch for me?” Fingon asked. Fifteen—he was only fifteen!

Maitimo blushed. “I gave all my paper and pens to Finrod,” he confessed.

“Why?”

“Because he has interest and talent. And I don’t. But never mind that, _cano_...I shall make it up to you. I’ll sing and cut capers, if I must.”

“I would like that,” said Fingon. “I mean, I would like for you to sing.”

Maitimo put his face in his hands. The gesture reminded Fingon of Maglor. “ _Dinna offer what you canna give_ ,” he moaned, with a convincing Highland burr. Then, in his own voice again, “Or so my grandfather was wont to say. All right, what shall it be? I wish I could call for Maglor—”

“But he is angry at me for taking ill, and won’t come into a sickroom,” Fingon pointed out quickly. He did not want Maglor, not in one of his wronged moods.

“Not angry, exactly...but you are right. I offered the song, and now I must sing it.” Maitimo belted his dressing gown, resolute. “Very well then. You’ll get _Flowers of the Forest_. That’s what Mother sings when we are sick, though I am afraid you shan’t have it just as she does it, for I am going to be bashful and put my fingers over my eyes.”

He did, but his mouth beneath was laughing rather than shy. Maitimo had a low singing voice, which broke if he rose too high, but it was clear and true on the right notes.

_I’ve heard the lilting, at the yowe-milking,_

_Lassies a-lilting before dawn o’ day;_

_But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning;_

_“The Flowers of the Forest are a’ wede away”._

_Dool and wae for the order sent oor lads tae the Border!_

_The English for ance, by guile wan the day,_

_The Flooers o’ the Forest, that fought aye the foremost,_

_The pride o’ oor land lie cauld in the clay._

“Bravo,” Fingon coughed, when the singing was finished. What he meant, even then, was:

_I would die for you._

“I would have warned you not to come at all, if I’d known you’d take ill,” Maitimo said. He lifted the cool compress from Fingon’s brow and then let his hand rest there, light and gentle as Mama’s. “You must get all the rest you can. I hope my singing hasn't made you _worse_ off.”

“I don’t want to make _you_ ill,” Fingon rasped.

“Don’t mind me. I’m always ill in one way or another, and yet I keep on.”

(Had he answered like that? Had he been so honest and true?)

Fingon lay there quietly for a while, and Maitimo sat beside him. If he slept—

—and woke again, it was only because the snow had heaped itself over him, chasing the warmth of candlelight and Maitimo away.

Fingon stirred. Every bone ached. He thought—he thought that if he was anything, it was bone alone. There was fire-heat, painful in its blaze, but he could not be warmed by it. He belonged to the ice and snow, now. He had known that when he died.

(Died?)

No. He did not die.

He gasped, wordlessly, and the shapes and shadows blurred into something recognizable. He had opened his eyes.

These were people he did not know. If he _had_ died, he had been surrounded by strangers when life left him. His hands and feet were gone, his face was all afire.

It was only then that he wondered how the snow had turned, so quickly, into flame.

“Lie still,” said a face with dark eyes showing above a muffler. “You’re thawing.”

The memory—he hadn’t finished it. There was more, after the song. Fingon _knew_ there was more. He flailed, as helpless as a swaddled babe, and his breathing quickened in his throat.

Breathing hurt.

“Careful now,” said the voice, more gently. A hand, fur-gloved, tugged down the muffler and Fingon could see the full face of a woman, dark-skinned as well as dark-eyed. She smiled at him.

It was a bedside kindness; something given to the weak, something given when hope was gone.

Fingon remembered all that it meant to be Fingon: gunshots and ashes, heartbreak and dwindling light. They had gone so many miles out of their way, so many months behind that should have been spent in freedom rather than fear.

Of course he had been surprised, to think that he still had a father.

Wachiwi stoked the woodfire again. He learned, later, that her name was Wachiwi.

He knew, then, that Maitimo was gone.

Over. Over the metal-ringing bridge, over the hoof-beaten earth. A stable stands near the fort, hemmed in by a low wall that looks only to be half-built. Snow has not come here; had barely touched the fields they trekked today and yesterday. Fingon sees everything, and hears everything, down to the heart in his breast.

(He still has a heart; such things remain in you, and cannot be forced out but by cutting.)

“Steady,” Finrod murmurs. Finrod is— _calm_. Fingon turns his head, half-expecting the bones in his neck to crack with tension at even this slight movement, and sees that there are tears in his cousin’s eyes. Tears, for another cousin, who never wept unless he lost himself.

“Steady,” Turgon echoes. His voice does not shake either.

Fingon cannot—echo. Fingon is not weeping. 

They walk like this (over): Father first, his hands in loose, careful fists at his sides. Then Finrod and Fingon, tightly abreast, and Turgon and Aredhel and Galadriel behind them, single file. Fingon knows that Finrod must have chosen to walk by his side. Must think that Fingon—needed that.

_Over._

(Over.)

The archers put down their bows; the gunmen their guns. They are entering Mithrim as night unfurls around them; Celegorm and Maglor lead, close and yet not so. They are side by side, but their bodies curve from each other as if such nearness repulses them.

The dying sun peers through the sky with one last glance, throwing down red light upon the blackening lake.

Fingon is not weeping.

( _Maedhros is dead_ , said Maglor, and though each word rested on his tongue like a hot coal, Fingon could find no comfort there.)

“Before you enter,” Celegorm says, turning sharply on his heel before the bolted doors of the stone fort, “You must hand over all your weapons.”

Turgon makes a growling sound in his throat, stopping short of speech. Huan, surprisingly, is silent.

Fingon watches his father stiffen along his spine.

“Fuck you, Celegorm,” Aredhel says, thrusting herself forward. At this, Huan whines. “We aren’t going to stab _you_ from behind. There’s six of us and several dozen of you. Where is Curufin, anyway? Hanging in the rafters with a slingshot to put our eyes out? Bat-like enough, for him.”

Her voice _does_ shake, but somehow it does a queer thing to Celegorm. His jaw works and he jerks away, facing front again. This, to a hunter such as him, is like surrender.

“No matter,” Maglor says softly, looking only at Fingolfin, with those half-mad eyes. “Come inside.” He laughs hollowly. “You must be…hungry, for news.”

It is Celegorm’s turn for a curious noise. Maglor raps thrice on one of the doors, quickly, then twice more, with a deliberate pause in between. The door opens.

( _Maedhros also?_ Father asked, rough-voiced, but his shoulders straightened. _Then we have come very late indeed._

 _You were not wanted,_ Celegorm answered.

The bows creaked. The guns shifted. Fingon did not move, not even for a breath’s sake.)

It is not until they are seated around a long mess table, under an open ceiling both thatched and raftered, that Fingon begins to decide how much of this he will willingly commit to memory. Not much, he decides. He does not want to see the tangled hair and milk-pale cheeks when he thinks of Maglor. Nor does he want to see Celegorm’s hard eyes and hard hands forever in his mind, hands so much blunter than—

He is nearly sick. He…he is nearly sick, here, pinched between Finrod and his sister, trying to live in a world where Maedhros is dead.

I _was supposed to die for_ you, he thinks numbly, as if Maedhros would ever have allowed that.

“Speak,” Celegorm says, dully cruel. “You’ve come a long way to be silent.”

Father remains himself. That is the goodness of Father. “We came to Ulmo’s Bridge to find it burned,” he begins. “We know what happened there. Argon died when we fled your pursuers. He was killed by militiamen. Your aunt is lost also. The winter, in Nebraska, struck us hard.”

He speaks almost gently, flaying their close-held losses. It is an act of violence, but they are _his_ losses, Fingon knows. If anyone has a right to choose the time and manner of his telling it is Fingolfin—and yet, and yet, and _yet_ —

“So you wish to know _how_?” Celegorm asks, his fingers curling. He is not pale, in the lantern light. He is burnished gold. “You wish to trade sorrows. Fat chance. You’ll wait longer than you did in the wilds—”

“Maglor,” Father interrupts. Celegorm stops like a plugged waterspout. “If you are the eldest, I will respect it. Do you see us as enemies?”

Maglor looks at Fingon, for the first time since. “We did not expect to see you at all.”

“Yet we are here, as we agreed when we last spoke to your father,” Father says. He will not cover _that_ wound with silence, either. “Maedhros also was there. We sent you gold—”

“The gold is gone.” Celegorm shrugs derisively. He has always been—averse to conversation, and Fingon hated him for that and for many things (or thought he did), but now that he seems to perform for an unseen audience, Fingon is less easy than ever.

There is no audience, after all. The hall was cleared when they entered it, but for them.

But for them.

“Do not ape Curufin,” Turgon says angrily, voicing Fingon’s thought. Aredhel elbows him (she is on his other side).

“So we are all less some pieces of our hearts,” she spits. “Are you satisfied? Have the Fingolfians bled enough? Have _you_?”

Celegorm does not quail, this time. He goes white-lipped and furious, and Fingon would be afraid of him, if he were—if he were afraid of any living man.

“Who let them in?”

It is not Uncle Feanor’s voice. It is _not_ , for the man is dead and even ghosts must sleep in their graves. But it is _like_ his voice, and the mouth is like his mouth, the eyes like his eyes.

Curufin is paler than Maglor. Paler, and poisoned from within rather than without. No light settles on his soot-dark hair.

“They come in peace,” Maglor says, careless. He looks half-drunk. “And in pieces.” There is a wry, cruel twist to his lips, at that. Fingon prefers it to the drunkenness.

Curufin advances like a cat. Fingon sees his father stiffen, and does not see him ease.

But of course. Feanor’s ghost. Feanor’s ghost, walking. Hating, as it did in life.

“They should not be here,” Curufin decrees, very coldly. “They should never have crossed the Mithrim bridge.”

( _Hold your fire_ , Maglor said, turning his back to his once-family.

 _What are you doing?_ cried Celegorm. His brother looked back at him, once.

 _Do you wish to hear them out,_ here _?_

Celegorm followed. Bitterly, with savage glances thrown at those who felt them not, but—he followed.)

So: Curufin does not follow, and he stands as Feanor’s ghost. Fingon has seen his uncle in his dreams, has fancied what he said, and what he did, and what he threatened, to bring Maedhros to the knees of all his promises. He has blamed—he _did_ blame Feanor first, because it was the last kindness he could offer.

At the time, it seemed like a kindness to his cousin. Now he knows it was a kindness to himself.

Fingon is on his feet, but he knows _this_ only because Finrod says,

“Fingon, hold!”

Fingon crosses the floor until he faces down Curufin. Curufin can look him levelly in the eyes. Up close, he is not so much like his father as to pierce and destroy. His hair curls at his collar, rather than laying straight. His nose and chin are a little narrower.

“We are not afraid of you,” Fingon says, turning snow to flame. “Nor do we wish the shelter of this fortress. We rode through hell to find _you_ , our false family, and we challenged the camps of Bauglir himself! For you, and for Grandfather. Don’t try to make us spies and traitors in this rathole.”

Curufin does not sneer or bare his teeth as a dog might (as Celegorm might). He smiles a thin-lipped smile and steps away, with his hands up, so that Fingon can see the glint of a knife against his palm.

“Do not try to make yourselves at home,” he says. “Maglor, a word?”

Another shift in the near-empty room. Fingolfin stands, and clears his throat. It is the same sound, that _harrumph_ , that Fingon remembers from his baby days. Some things have not changed at all, and those cut sharper than steel. “Will no one tell me why and how my brother died?”

“He would not have called you his brother,” Curufin says, silk-smooth. “So perhaps you have no right to know.”

“Christ,” Celegorm grumbles. “He was shot in the fucking chest.”

There is the barest pause. Maglor covers his mouth with his hands. Fingon is afraid this means laughter, but it doesn’t.

“Where are Caranthir and the twins?” Galadriel asks. She has been uncharacteristically meek, until now. Her hands are fists, though. Her fingers are curled as tightly as Celegorm’s.

Celegorm, at that question, kicks back the bench on which he sits, and stands. He is all ablaze, with no need for lamplight: the Feanorians could always blaze with their eyes. “You do not ask about _him_ , Fingon. You don’t ask how he died. _Don’t you want to know_?”

(Over.)

Fingon walks towards his father, and puts a hand on his arm. _Imagine you are Finrod_ , he tells himself. _Imagine you are calm, despite your tears._

(But Fingon is not weeping.)

“Uncle,” Finrod says, on his feet also, “I think we had better go.” He turns his head and gazes down at Maglor, who is still seated, askew on the bench Celegorm kicked.

“Fingon saved your fiddle,” he says quietly, and Maglor lifts his head. “Yes,” Finrod continues, “He carried it three thousand miles, and would not let us burn it, even when it grew so cold that our flesh froze on our bones. He did not tell me; we kept secrets from each other, sometimes, to stay alive.”

Maglor does not answer. He does not cover his mouth with his hands, this time. He lays his arms on the table and buries his face in them.

“Go,” Celegorm rasps, and Fingolfin answers, with terrible dignity,

“We are going.”

And they are. Over, over the stone-flagged floor, over the beaten path, over the bridge.

Only the stars shine, now.

(Fingon remembers all of it.)

“While we are not riding, it may be best to keep these poultices against your palms.” Fingon tears another length of bandage—frayed badly, for all have been boiled and reused many times over—and wraps it around Estrela’s hand. The scabs there are still delicate, because the wounds have not been able to heal properly. Malnourishment will do that. There are cord marks at her wrists, also, but though they are ugly and abraded, they are not so deep. “What…if you do not mind saying, what left these marks?”

She blinks her one eye. Nods. “Metal. A…switch.”

Fingon blinks, too. His eyes and throat are parched; his tongue is thick from talking. His precious candle is burning low. “The cuts may heal more cleanly, then, if the—switch was thin.” He remembers her face, and is deeply ashamed. “I only mean—” He should not be treating anyone, if he cannot be attentive. How Doctor Olorin would scold, if he knew that Fingon was trying to distract himself with others’ hurts!

“Doctor Fingon,” Estrela slurs, “Your hands are shaking. Are you alright?”

She is gracious. Better than him; Fingon is always keenly, sharply aware of that. Of how stodgy and foolish and small-minded he is, even now. Even when he tries to be _better_.

(He swore an oath to a dead man. Can he rightly serve the living?)

“I…”

“I know things did not go well at the fort,” Estrela says. If he listens closely, he understands that her voice is gentle. Almost tender. As if he was the patient, and she the doctor.

He wonders what she wanted to be, when she had two eyes.

“They did not go well,” he admits, twisting the bandage in his hands. He hopes she can’t see his face very well, in the failing light. “We have—we have family there. More family. They—they wronged us, and such a thing will not be soon mended—”

He stops.

Here is a person before him, who did not know Maedhros, and who thus will not know what it means, the…news of him. Fingon can say nothing more, to that.

“I still have two hands, Doctor. They will not fall off while you tend to those who are hurt more than I am.” She is smiling. Smiling, beyond and despite her ruined mouth. “Or while you rest, yourself.”

The sob catches in his throat. He—he did not expect the tears to come _afterwards_. He had expected to cry in front of Celegorm.

Had thought himself heartless, when no tears came.

“Oh, dear,” Estrela mumbles, and her hand—the one he was treating—darts out and darts back, as she changes her mind about touching him.

Fingon reminds himself of Russandol. Whatever hells these people lived in, they had friends there too. The number of eyes or hands does not change that; does not change what it means to be human.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I make a poor showing of my work today.”

“I don’t think so.” Estrela leans back, so that her head rests against the sack of grain that has had to suffice for a pillow in their hasty camp. She gives him the dignity of directing her gaze away. After a moment, she ventures, “Would you do something for me?”

He dashes his sleeve across his eyes. “Anything.”

“See to Gwindor. I fear he is very unwell, though he will not show it.”

“Because…”

Her face twists. “We lost a friend.”

Fingon smiles, forcing it to his lips with too much knowledge of easy smiles, gone before—and gone. “Then perhaps I should not leave _you_.”

Estrela nods to where the smaller of her two charges is curled in a stray blanket close by, nothing but his dark head peeping out. “I am not alone. Go.”

He leaves after making certain that Maria and some of the other women, both from the slave-camp and not, are close by if she should call.

The land around the Mithrim moat is hemmed by trees, but there is some open turf along the far shore of the lake.

That is where they have settled.

“Far enough to make arrows miss their mark,” Turgon said, grimly. “I don’t know about guns.”

“I do not think that they shall shoot at us,” Finrod answered. He gripped Turgon’s arm, briefly, bracingly. “Steady.”

Still, they have guards patrolling the shore-side of the camp, with torches, and they keep the women and children and invalids as near to the forest beyond as feels…safe.

 _Wolves_. The thought strays through Fingon’s disordered mind. He lets it go. He puts one foot in front of the other, does not turn to see Wister teaching the youngsters how to mend an arrow at the fireside, does not turn his ear to hear his father planning their next move with Haleth, in the dark.

Does Gwindor even remain? The man looked like he’d lost a world.

(Here is the rest of the story that a boy born of ice could not recall: the Maitimo he knew and loved told him Irish folktales, and when the doctor came to see to his fevered brow and inflamed throat, a stranger’s hands, though trained, were not half so gentle—not half so skilled—)

Gwindor is a shape in shadow, at the edge of their camp. He faces the trees. There is a small fire beside him, but he does not tend it. It has fallen to little more than embers.

“Have you eaten?” Fingon asks, brightly, like a man who has not just been crying at a woman’s bedside.

There is a long beat of silence, during which Fingon is left to wonder whether the man heard him, or cares to act as if he did. “No.”

“You ought to eat.” Fingon sits down, uninvited. The ground is hard, barely warmed. He tucks his hands into the sleeves of his coat. Shakes his braids over his shoulders.

Gwindor says, “Belle sent you, didn’t she?”

“Yes. But I am a doctor; I should be here, anyway.”

“Unless you’ve a mend for a shoulder twisted nigh on six years ago, I’ve naught that ails me.”

Fingon saw Maedhros, in the winter. He was a mocking specter, at some times, and at others, a welcome reprieve.

When spring came, Fingon let himself be angry at last. It hurt; he forced the anger anyway.

To Gwindor, he says, “I learned, today, that my cousin is—is dead.”

Gwindor says nothing.

“He was my best friend.” Fingon sounds young. He knows he does. Despite the braids Wachiwi threaded, despite the callouses on his hands, despite the grief that has torn itself out of his throat time and time again—young.

Gwindor sighs. Impatient, or sympathetic? It is too dark to tell. Fingon is not seeking sympathy, though. That is not his purpose at all. He is trying to get the man talking, so that his own loss does not fester. _That_ is a task for a doctor.

_If taking that oath is so damn important to you, then why don’t you swear it now?_

“It’s a luckless world,” Gwindor offers, finally.

“I hated him,” Fingon says. He knows it is a lie. He knows it. But it was also a sin: the attempt. “He and—and his brothers, and his father most of all…they did my family great wrong. And I spent—I spent months upon months, loss upon loss, hating him with all my might.”

“Did you.” Is Gwindor incredulous, or disgusted?

“I wanted to believe I did.” Fingon pinches finger to thumb, reminding himself to be grateful for fingers that only tingle with cold. Fingers that can still feel. “It seemed so important, to renounce our friendship.”

“But now that he’s gone?”

“Now that he’s gone, I hate myself.”

“That’s a fool move.”

Fingon gambles. “Strange words from a man who has also made it.”

 _That_ surprises a scoff, close enough to a laugh that Fingon can believe he has not failed Estrela utterly, coming here. “That’s a fine bit of cheek, doctor, but you’ve got it all wrong. ‘Course a man who hates himself knows he’s a fool. That’s half the cruelty of it.”

“Because,” Fingon asks, his voice dropping to a whisper as the embers fade from sunset to blood, “You know it won’t do a bit of good?”

_What? To you?_

_If you like…And if you do not mind the blasphemy._

(It crawls over his skin, that memory.)

“Aye.” Gwindor scratches his chin. “Don’t suppose a doctor has a pipe on him? It’s been an age since I had a proper smoke.”

This man was a slave. Fingon finds himself selfish, in his grief. He dragged that selfishness clear across this camp, and clear across the country. He shouldn’t be grieving a faithless murderer, when Argon and Mama are dead. Shouldn’t be grieving… _Maedhros_ , when the innocent are at hand.

_Do not offer what you cannot give._

His eyes blur. His heart was made too large, or perhaps, too small.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t.”

(How hot Argon’s blood was on him—how quickly it cooled. He will never see their makeshift graves again, most likely, Argon’s and Mama’s, but he did see _them_ —)

“No matter.” Gwindor shifts, rubs at his shoulder. He is fidgeting more than he was; Fingon wonders if that is a good sign. He is haunted by the sight of this man coming over the field, this man, who could scarcely answer Haleth’s questions, who seemed driven wild with slack-jawed pain. “You can tell Belle you’ve done your duty, doctor.”

Fingon is stubborn. Maedhros used to tell him so, laughing and proud. As if even Fingon’s childish flaws were something to be cherished and protected.

(He spent the miles carving his cousin to nothing. The dead men and the spent women, the stolen promises and the loss—the loss.)

“Tell me about Russandol,” Fingon says. Stubborn; selfish. It is all the same. He is a doctor because he had to be.

Gwindor could strike him, if he hurled himself across the embers to pummel Fingon in his deserving face. He doesn’t.

“Why d’you want to know?”

“Because I think it would do you good to speak of him,” Fingon says. “Saying what I said just now did some good for me.”

“You’d better tell me about your dead cousin, then. We aren’t the same.” Gruff, but not vicious. Fingon has tired of soft words, anyway.

“Since you asked,” he says, with a smile that is likely a ghost of its brash self, “He was my hero, and a good deal taller than me.”

Gwindor grunts. “Hm. You aren’t particular tall.”

If Fingon smiles, perhaps Maedhros is less dead. Perhaps all of this is a dream, and can be closed between the covers of a book, along with the long, dreadful winter, and Mama’s grey lips, and Argon’s heaving, open ribcage.

(See? Fingon can dwell, unfeeling, on these things.)

(Fingon is hard as stone, bright as a summer sky, and not at all himself. How would Maedhros like him, now?)

He huffs a shaking breath. “Our fathers didn’t get on. Mine was in the right, though. Never did anything but seek peace. We—as a family, we at last decided to live in harmony. We ought all to have traveled together. They…my uncle and cousins left first, and so arrived first. They were no help to us, in all our need. I thought my cousin—the one who—I thought he would be different. I thought he wouldn’t leave me. I want to be angry at him, still. It makes me hate myself—”

“As you said,” Gwindor murmurs.

“Yes.” Fingon squints his eyes until the embers blur. He tells himself that this means something; the blurring. Something more or less than it meant in Estrela’s tent, he is not sure. “Yes, I know I’m speaking in circles. I’m sorry. This isn’t…this isn’t what I came to do.”

(After all these years, he must accept a truth that should not burden him: Maglor loved _him_ more. Maglor loved him better.

Maglor was so plainly and utterly destroyed.)

(Gwindor does not know who Maglor is. Who Maedhros is. Gwindor, like Estrela, knows a different world than Fingon’s. An uglier one in all the ways that should matter. Fingon must remember that.)

Gwindor does not speak for a moment. The embers blush darker, as they cool.

“I thought I might do it tonight,” Gwindor tells him, his voice quiet.

“What?”

“End it. The little ones have Belle—Estrela, now. The rest have you and Haldar’s sister. Your father. The fair-haired one.”

Fingon becomes himself again. Awkward, urgent, certain. “You cannot. Gwindor, my friend, you must not think yourself unneeded—”

“Don’t worry, lad. I’ve changed my mind.” Gwindor dusts off his knees and stands. “First off, I couldn’t be sure who’d find me. And then there’s you.”

“Me?” Fingon rises, too.

“You.” Gwindor smiles, now. Fingon can hear it in his voice. “You’re cut deep over a dead body you can’t even see. Same as I am.”

“You didn’t see your friend—”

“I didn’t see Russandol die,” Gwindor answers, interrupting. “But I saw death take him. It means the same thing.”

Fingon wonders whether Maedhros died bravely. He must have; he wasn’t a coward at heart.

(It would be easier, maybe, if he was.)

“Russandol was foolish.” Gwindor has not taken another step. He is rooted to this hard ground, above the lake, but he said he has decided not let the ground have him, yet. “He never saw a bullet he wouldn’t leap for. Didn’t seem to understand how much a bullet could hurt him, mind. He just—he thought he could stand in the path of everything and everyone, and it…it took him, like I said.” His deep-drawn breath is tortured, hideous, and like a death in itself.

“Also,” says Gwindor, choked, “He was tall.”

Fingon laughs. It is crying-laughing, the sort of giddiness that takes the weary, the drunken, the broken-hearted. He laughs until he is doubled-over with his face in his hands. His face and hands are wet. Gwindor grips his shoulder.

“Come now, Doctor Fingon. Estrela wouldn’t have sent you over for this.”

“You’re right,” Fingon gasps. His ears and cheeks flame hot, in the chilly night. He pats Gwindor’s hand awkwardly, then shrugs it away. “Lord, I’m sorry. I’ll—I—”

“Russandol would have liked you,” Gwindor says.

They begin walking, side by side, away from the dormant coals and towards the heart of the torch-circled tents. Fingon scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

He ventures, finally, “And Maitimo would have liked you.”

(Maglor said, _Maedhros is dead_ , and Fingon believed him.)

(Maedhros said, _if you do not mind the blasphemy_ , and Fingon believed that too.)

Gwindor stops. The world stops too, maybe, but Gwindor stops first, as if he knows the end is coming. Here is the arrow: it does not fly from Mithrim, after all.

In a voice like a man who has already slain himself, this man of the slack-jawed loss, Gwindor cries,

“ _What did you say?_ ”

Fingon remembers all that it means to be Fingon.


	3. his valour was as a fire

Doctor Olorin offered to listen to his lungs. This, after Fingon suggested (too plaintively, he thought, a moment later) that his breathing had grown shallow.

“The summer air is very dense,” Doctor Olorin said. He was not overly concerned, and Fingon fell into meek silence, attending to the bookkeeping he had been assigned.

A week later, when they finished replenishing the doctor’s supply of herbs, Doctor Olorin beckoned him with two fingers. “Come here, and let’s see to it.”

“To what?” Fingon asked, stupidly.

“Your breathing.”

So Fingon stripped off his shirt and sat upon the plain table (his legs dangled, and they were almost certainly done growing, which was a pity—or a vanity). All around the little room, the tincture bottles were globes of golden light. The sunshine of an August afternoon could find its way anywhere. To anyone.

Doctor Olorin lifted the fluted wood stethoscope, held the bell against Fingon’s back for the count of twenty, then sighed.

“What is it?” Fingon was worried.

“In less than five years, we shall have a reasonably effective bi-aural model. Mark my words—and my shame for not attending to the invention of one myself. _This_ is frustratingly crude.”

“Oh.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your lungs, my boy,” Olorin added.

“Oh…” Again, relief without much substance. Much strength.

“Have you considered whether something is amiss with head or heart? I know we have had a difficult few months…here and everywhere.”

( _Fingon, do not go!_

His father had not been happy with his desire to study…unconventionally. His father had, however, been the one to speak to Doctor Olorin, to learn what he did in streets where no Finweans walked. To ask whether his son’s time would be well-spent.

His father had never, Fingon realized, actually _opposed_ him.

 _They are firing upon a crowd, Father_ , he said, standing in the door with his coat half on, no hat, and the little bag he had begun to always carry with him. _They are raining bricks from housetops. Whoever is to blame, there are innocent people out there! I—I must help Olorin. I must!_

He watched, half-dazed and half-fascinated, as his father’s hands and jaw clenched and worked in unison.

Before his father could speak again, Fingon ran.)

“I think we should see a play,” said Maedhros.

It was September.

Fingon—

(Maedhros had been the one to take him to the Astor Place Theatre, months earlier. It had been intended, without staggering success, to open as an opera house. As it was, plays were being held there instead.

 _This is not an uncouth establishment, I promise_. Maedhros had worn his most innocent expression, suggesting this.

 _Grandmother doesn’t approve of the theatre, I think_ , Fingon had observed doubtfully, and Maedhros had teased,

_It’s a mad world, I acknowledge. There are those that offer…entertainment, on the upper floors. She is on firm footing, to be so hard._

Fingon had had half-a-dozen conversations if he’d had one, trying to convince Maedhros to worship Grandmother; or at least, to understand that she was not hard at all.)

“A play?”

Maedhros’s smile was as carefully tuned as one of Maglor’s instruments. Fingon could…could _see_ the care there, where he had never noticed (or wanted to notice) it before. “The pursuit of a good story, and good theatre, cannot be drowned out forever, can it?”

“The day is fine…”

“So many days are fine.” Maedhros shrugged. “We needn’t go, of course, if you don’t like—but this is a small affair, Fingon. And it isn’t the Scottish play, if superstition worries you.”

Fingon felt something twisting in his lungs. It wasn’t his breath. Doctor Olorin had said for certain that it wasn’t his breath.

(The noise had been deafening. The cannon had boomed, and Fingon had been sick at heart. Were they—at war? Here, in the heart of their own land?

He wasn’t trampled by the throng. Father need not have feared for that. Ten thousand strong, that throng, he’d later learn—but at the time Fingon had followed Doctor Olorin closely, and they had not ventured to the heart of the melee.

Still, waiting at the outskirts had been hell. There had been more than a hundred wounded, and many of them were hauled off to the jailhouse rather than turned over to doctors’ hands.

Blood and soot, tears of rage and rotten things.

Fingon would forget none of it.)

“I…” And he let himself be led; a boy giving way to a man. They were seated on velvet-backed chairs before he knew it, overlooking the lamplit gallery before he knew it, choking (at least he was) on floral _parfums_ before he knew it.

The play in this modest theater was _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ —Maglor’s favorite. Maedhros laughed a good deal. Beat his gloves against his knee for applause. Rested his perfect chin on one long-fingered hand.

There was a pain in Fingon’s chest, as if one of the horses in the streets outside had come beyond the varnished walls, reared up and struck him with an iron-plated hoof. His profession—if he could call it that yet, what with being only eighteen, and a lowly apprentice—taught him to understand the origin of ills as well as their symptoms.

Fingon did not want to understand this pain, particularly, and that frightened him.

Shying from the truth always frightened him. 

Was that what Doctor Olorin had meant?

( _You are right_ , Olorin had said, putting a hand on Fingon’s shoulder. The man was not usually so—demonstrative. _This is a war._

Fingon had stuttered, eyes stinging, _I didn’t say that._

_Cannon-fire and blood can shake a man. Any man._

_I mustn’t be a man before I am a doctor._ It was the best he could do, since he _had_ been shaken.

More than that, he’d been afraid. Fingon had been afraid that the whole tide of their lives would change, just as the city was changing.

Of course, the police cannons, in the end, exerted less influence on Fingon’s life than did a single pistol.)

“Lord, I feel as drunk as Maglor does on a heavy dose of harp music,” Maedhros cried, throwing his arms out. They had come by rented carriage; they would have to leave by carriage, too. Fingon twisted his hat in his hands. “What is it, _cano_? Didn’t you enjoy it?”

Was that a dare? And when—Fingon found he could not remember, when his cousin had last called him by that childhood name.

“It was beautifully done,” he said stiffly. The thing under his ribs was neither heart nor lungs. Neither grief nor life.

It was anger.

Maedhros took a half-step towards him, as if to seize his arm, but then retreated. “Let us follow this with a proper drink,” he suggested, more quietly. “We’ve—we’ve scarcely seen each other.”

_Since._

_Since your father—_

But Fingon would not say that. He must not; it would all be over if he said _that_.

_The pursuit of a good story…_

He had agreed eagerly enough, in answer to Maedhros’s note, to join him for a day’s jaunt. The invitation had felt fragile in his hands, though it was scrawled on the back of the same ivory calling card as always.

( _We must forgive them, Fingon. We must_. Grandfather Finwe had gripped him in both his strong and tender hands, speaking those words.

Fingon, tormented, shaken though a week had passed, had said, _Whom?_ )

“I do not know that I should stay out late.” He was like Father—stiff, yes, and formal, but _loyal_ , by God, why couldn’t everyone see how he’d been loyal? And _was_ loyal, even now…

He no longer was ashamed of Father’s stiffness. He felt rather fiercely protective of it. Of him.

“You’re a man, you know,” Maedhros said, teasing. “And a man—” But he stopped, lifted his high silk hat an inch from his head and dropped it down again. “Ah, well. If you feel you had best be home, I shan’t dissuade you.”

“Thank you.”

Yet Maedhros did not step to the curb, so as to hail their carriage. He loitered. Fingon felt that he was being carefully watched. Before—before the dreadful day this summer, it had never occurred to him that Maedhros’s eye could be as sharp as his father’s, for all he saw so much.

Fingon wondered what was _right_ to do. He always leapt too soon; he knew that of himself. “We have not seen much of each other.”

“I’ve been away,” Maedhros agreed. “It was summer.” This wasn’t quite true. It had been a strange year. Maedhros and Maglor left early in May, and before they returned for a month in June—in support of Maglor’s celebrated, and never-ending musical debut, Fingon had been off (unexpectedly) to Washington.

Doctor Olorin (and, he suspected, his father) had wanted him to have a change of scene. As it was, Fingon never told his cousin of those days in May. They hadn’t had a moment together until Grandfather’s birthday. Fingon had not known how to write out his memories in a letter. It was not the first time he had seen the dead and dying, but it was it was still, somehow, the cruelest.

The lamplight, never nearly as bright as day, seemed almost painfully strong. 

Maedhros _had_ written afterwards, to tell no stories of grief, but to say that he was sorry. Fingon had too, in a way.

 _I wanted us to be well again_ , he thought, watching his cousin watch him. _I wanted us to be well again, just as I_ _wanted the whole world to be well the morning after that long, carousing night—_

(Finwe had made a brief return to public appearance, the day following the disturbance at Astor Place. Fingon had not seen him go—he had been wasted with exhaustion, sleeping at home while Mama sent for a doctor he didn’t need.

Finwe had gone to City Hall to champion for peace and order, and a young boy had died among the still-angry crowd.)

Maedhros shuffled his feet, then strode forward with a sudden flash of purpose. One of the roving carriages drew near.

Fingon clenched his fists, but he followed.

Inside the carriage, it was dark and close. What light filtered in through the windows flashed across Maedhros’s face, turned half towards the window. Fingon swallowed against the lump in his throat and the pain in his chest. They were seated across from each other and would have had to raise their voices to speak.

Fingon dared not.

There was so much, that Fingon did not dare.

(Each time Uncle Feanor laughed, the sound had grated. Fingon had wanted to get away from the long table, away from smiles that were not aimed with kindness, away from grave resolve that could not conceal pain—

Fingon had hoped it was not on his own behalf. Had hoped, and hoped, until they were gone from the table, standing in the drawing room, and Father had said—

 _Will you not hold your tongue, Feanor?_ )

“There you are,” Maedhros said. He helped Fingon down from the carriage, because he was so much taller, and then he insisted on paying the driver from his own purse. They stood before the doors of Fingon’s father’s house, a place Maedhros had not entered in months.

Even when Maedhros had come to make their peace, he had done it on the front steps. Afterwards, they had sought out a park to walk through, so that they might be shielded from the scrutiny of their family by the blur of other people.

“Thank you,” Fingon said. He was tired; even without having had a drop of liquor, his eyes swam. “For inviting me. We should see each other more, truly—”

“Except that you do not wish to.”

Fingon bit down hard, almost on his tongue. Maedhros was toying with the gold head of his cane, and under the many out-door lanterns that Father kept burning always, Fingon could see that he was smiling.

“I never said that.”

“You’ve never had to say anything,” Maedhros said, still not looking quite at him. “Ever since you were small, you know—you went two years of your life without saying a word. You only growled.”

“Do you want me to growl now?” Fingon asked, feeling foolish and desperate. He was merely doing what was necessary. That was why it carved love from loyalty like the edge of a blade.

“Lord, _cano_.” A faint laugh. “If it would help you.”

Fingon shut his eyes. When he opened them again, it was all exactly the same as it had been a moment before. “We can’t force…we can’t—”

“It’s been hell all year,” Maedhros interrupted. He was looking up, now, but what good did that do, when Fingon couldn’t meet his eyes in the dark? “I’ll swear a little, will that do? It’s been fucking hell. I’m no happier than you are. I’ve filtered through a thousand _if onlys_ since—since June, yes. Of course it all comes down to June.”

“But it doesn’t!”

“What?”

Fingon took a breath. “I was _there_ , Maitimo. At the opera house. Not when it all began, but…but after. I bandaged bullet wounds and worse. I—I helped mothers look for bodies in the street, I…”

“You were…” Maedhros spoke slowly, shifting from one foot to the other, as if he did not quite understand. “But you can’t have been _there_ , Fingon. Surely your father wouldn’t have allowed—”

“He doesn’t own me,” Fingon said, which was a rather sharp and cruel thing to say. The back of his mind knew it. He could never shake those pricks of conscience, no matter how much he wished to. “I went to help Olorin. It’s what a doctor should do.”

“Is that why they packed you off to Washington?” Maedhros asked. “Because you did what a doctor should do?”

 _He’s a beast, just like his father_ , roared through Fingon’s mind, but it was enough of a betrayal that the anger left him, though it had—had surged. He kept calm, and stiff.

 _Loyal_.

“Yes,” he said. “I’d had a bit of a shock, I suppose. Seeing the ruin of men. Seeing the ruin of bullets—of even just one.”

Maedhros made a strange sound in his throat.

“We didn’t want him to come,” Fingon said. He didn’t sound like himself, but maybe that was what it felt like, to _not_ be angry. “We never do, you know, except—except Father. Father was happy because…because he’d never entered our house before. Grandfather had suggested it. Grandfather signed his name, you know—”

Maedhros did know. That was how the fight had begun. With Uncle Feanor scolding Grandfather Finwe, for protesting the banishment of Macready, scintillating star of the English stage, whose career had been irreverently cut short by the hatred of Americans and Irishmen both. Heartened by the support of half the prominent names in the city, Macready had made his return to the Astor Place Theatre.

History would tell the rest.

“It was a political disagreement,” Maedhros said, less slowly now. “Tempers were running high. If you were there, Fingon, you would know that there were Irish who died, and you know—”

“I know nothing,” FIngon said. “Nothing, at least, that matters as much as my father. His life, particularly—and what your father did. Is that what a brother should do?”

Maedhros went very still. If the words were arrows—or bullets—

“He didn’t kill him,” said Maedhros, in a voice unlike any Fingon had ever heard. 

The anger didn’t fall away, this time. “But you,” Fingon said. “ _You would have let him_.”

“I said he would have liked you,” Fingon mumbles, drawn out of himself. A little embarrassed. “My cousin, he—”

“ _Maitimo_ ,” Gwindor hisses, seizing him by the arm. For all that the man seems to favor one shoulder, he has an iron grip. “You said _Maitimo_.”

It dawns. The world; the way. Fingon does not weep, but not out of numbness. “ _You knew him_?”

Gwindor shakes his head, but not to answer—almost to bestir himself, as if he wakes from a long sleep. At last, he manages to say, “He was Russandol to me.”

Fingon’s hand finds Gwindor’s hand. He does not try to free himself from the man’s grasp. His fingers claw and spasm. He has forgotten what it means, to move and touch and _think_. He spent three thousand miles, thinking he understood loss. He has spent the last few hours of this longest day, reeling from death’s last lesson.

It had seemed like the last, at least. Nothing was safe, nothing could ever be safe, but—it had seemed like the last.

Fingon finds his voice. A strange thing, the voice of a quiet child and a stupid man. “But Russandol…is alive.”

Fingon doesn’t remember much about the next half hour. He does remember where he is—a little—when Turgon and Finrod and yes, Gwindor, are trying to hold him back from charging into an array of armed guards.

“Fingon,” Finrod snaps in his ear, “Think of what you’re doing, we agreed to wait until morning—”

“Maglor!” Fingon shouts, howling into the dark. Silent no longer, now that his blood is in him, and they were wolves, once, weren’t they? Maedhros called them wolves. Before Fingon even had memories, he had Maedhros. “Maglor, Celegorm—damn you all, come _out_!”

It is Celegorm, in fact, who comes first—but he comes from behind. Fingon was stopped at the bridge, since his cousins’ men blockade the far side, but Celegorm….is with Aredhel, and they appear from the direction of Fingolfin’s camp. 

Fingon scarcely spares more than a thought to the curiosity of this. He wheels violently, nearly breaking free.

“ _Celegorm_ ,” he snarls, and Celegorm and his dog go still. Huan’s ears folds back; he lifts one paw. It is long past dark, but the guards carry torches.

Even in shades of pitch and gold, Fingon can see that Celegorm is pale.

“Put down your weapons,” Celegorm orders, in a strange voice. He strides forward, and Huan unfreezes and strides with him. Aredhel hangs back, her hand fisted in her braid. A tic of childhood.

The guards lower their guns and bows. They also part to let someone through. Maglor steps forward, his hair disheveled, bundled in a coat that looks too large for him. Curufin is with him. So is—that must be Caranthir, Fingon realizes, though he is much changed, and one of the twins, changed even more greatly.

Fingon has never been a great hand at telling them apart. Maedhros could do it, seemingly, with his eyes closed.

 _Maedhros_.

There is a flurry of voices. His father has not joined them, yet, but _that_ can only be a matter of time. Finrod is making promises about keeping the peace, and Curufin is demanding what they are plotting in the middle of the night—

But when Fingon wrestles himself free at last, he is looking into the faces of Maglor and Celegorm, who have crowded close.

Much closer than they were in the early evening. They look as hard and ruined as they did earlier, but Fingon is breathing as of old, on the edge of a knife, and he does not hesitate a moment longer, in the telling.

“You claim he is not dead,” Curufin says. He has taken the seat at the head of the table, and the rest of them are crowded around it—the Feanorians, yes, but also Finrod, Fingolfin, and Gwindor. Aredhel stands behind Celegorm with her arms folded over her chest. Her face is pinched.

Celegorm is gnawing on his knuckles.

“He isn’t,” Fingon says. “Gwindor here saw him two days ago.”

Every head turns. Gwindor’s jaw is set so hard it twitches. He is out of place in this hall, not because of his ragged clothes or matted, sun-bleached hair, but because he looks like he would rather be running. 

“Who is Gwindor?” Curufin asks, sharply.

“Who the hell are _you_?” Gwindor snaps, and Curufin turns poisonous, leaping up from his seat.

“Sit _down_.” That is Finrod.

Fingon tucks his hands between his knees because they are shaking.

“Don’t you want to hear the man out?” Finrod says, looking at Maglor.

Celegorm takes his knuckles out of his mouth. “Yes.”

_We were—we were at the compound together. He worked beside me for months. We called him….Russandol, never knew—never knew much about him but—_

_I heard him named Maitimo, once._

(Maedhros twisted his hands together and said, _Fingon, I am sorry. Please, I spoke cruelly. Fingon_ —

 _Maitimo,_ that Fingon said, young and wanting to be well. _It’s all right. Or—it shall be. I promise._ )

“I and the rest of ‘em were kept as labor by the mountain,” Gwindor says. “About—it was late summer. They sent him down. We’d planned a way out, and when they—” he jerks his head towards Fingon and Fingon’s loyal kin—“came, it was lucky.”

Fingon’s eyes burn. His throat burns. He is going to weep. It is unstoppable: this wave and darkling depth that is not anger, that is not even (wholly) loss.

He hears his father, next. Fingolfin says,

“Maglor. How did your brother die?”

Maglor’s face does not contort in the images of exaggerated anguish that Fingon might have expected, or to which he was once used. He opens his mouth and shuts it again. Then he says, without meeting the glance of any:

“He was taken captive by Melkor Bauglir.”

Fingon is cold all over. It was years before he knew that name, and then, when he did, it—did not matter so much to him as it did to others. Not until Father at length agreed with Uncle Feanor that it was Melkor who had broken open their family. Who had killed Grandfather Finwe.

All this, Fingon only learned in going west.

(When will death be done with him? Done with teaching him?)

“Aye,” Gwindor says. “Melkor Bauglir’s the one who lives in the mountain.”

“Late summer, you say?” Celegorm demands, strangled. “He—he was alive then?”

“He was alive two days ago, as I told,” Gwindor answers, hollow. “He couldn’t make it out with us. There were children missing. He went back to find them. I—” He puts one gnarled hand over his mouth, then. Retching.

“Children?” That is Aredhel.

Fingon can see nothing through his tears but Gwindor, dragging himself and two small, living bodies across the plains. Can hear nothing but his own voice, sickly with the empty comfort of a stranger:

_A quick death in battle is more and less pain. This Russandol must have thought himself free, for a little while. He passed the children to Gwindor. They are friends, they would have spoken, before..._

He stares at nothing. The war rages on.

“The children were brought back. It seems…” How can Father sound so calm? “That Maedhros was recaptured. By Mairon the hunter, I think…Gwindor, I am sorry, but was that not the name?”

A scuffle. Celegorm is on his feet.

“He’s dead, then,” Curufin is saying—shouting, almost, in a high, shrill voice. “He’s dead, Celegorm, we knew he was dead always—”

“We didn’t!” (Caranthir?) “We didn’t fucking know—”

The only twin there is does not raise his voice. Maybe Fingon observes this—observes _him_ —because his bleary gaze is drawn by flame-colored hair. His father and Finrod have questions and fraught words of peace, but those are as wind scattering leaves. Fingon cannot hear them aright.

Instead, he hears Gwindor say,

“Yes, he is dead now,”

—and that is enough.

Fingon rises from the table and crosses the long hall. He pushes open the door without looking behind him to see whose eyes or orders follow.

He walks a long way, through the cold stone of the tomb-not-called-a-tomb, where Feanor is dead but Maedhros—isn’t, or wasn’t, when there was still time. When at last he passes the guards and the front gates, and is really alone again, he falls to his knees on the nameless ground and weeps.

“Fingon.” His father does not sound so calm, now. The hands shaking him are not his father’s, though. They are Aredhel’s.

“He’s all right,” his sister says. “He’s just—were you asleep?”

“I don’t know,” Fingon answers stupidly, and he is telling the truth. He did not rest, and he did not dream, but nor does he have any real guess at how long he has been—here. Weeping. Waiting.

“I have told your cousins that they should sleep,” Father says, stretching out his hands and helping him to his feet. “Finrod and Gwindor have gone back to camp, but Aredhel and I knew that we ought to find you.” He laughs a faint, pained laugh and says, “We cannot have you missing.”

Fingon walks with them. The moon shines down and lights the bridge below. He says,

“What did I—what was said?”

“We shall speak amongst ourselves in the morning. I do not know what will be gained by laying blame, so I think we must wait—”

“Wait?” Fingon wheels on him. “Father, we can’t _wait_. If he has a chance, the chance is _now_. This moment, and none other! We can find our way back to that damnable mountain; Haleth will know where to go. They will still be reeling from the losses she inflicted, they will not be— _Bauglir_ will not be ready—”

“We know very little of Bauglir.” Fingolfin does not withdraw his supporting arm, but he is his sternest self. “And less of this fiendish _Mairon_. More than that, even, I will not ask Haleth to extend herself again. I respect her utterly, Fingon, but she is not even your own age. She has duties of her own, and she feels that she has honored her dead. We cannot ask her to save ours.”

Fingon chokes. “So you think that he is—he—”

“Fingon,” Aredhel pleads. When she is soft, like that, she sounds like their mother. Fingon wants to wrench away from her and from his father. Their goodness and reason is like salt pressed to bleeding flesh.

“We cannot know,” Fingolfin answers. “And because we cannot know, we cannot take risks that will lead us to naught but more heartache. Hush now. You also need sleep. None of us are ourselves, now, and we are not safe here.”

Fingon shuts his mouth.

Fingon sets his jaw.

(Maedhros _had_ groveled. That was the only word for it. It had moved Fingon to pity, a sensation that frightened and disturbed him, and he had fought fiercely to escape it. He had allowed his cousin to believe himself forgiven, though it was not Maedhros’ apology Fingon had wanted. He had done his best to restore what was lost between them, staunching the bleeding sickness in his heart, heaving out breaths that were not, strictly, _wrong_ —

But it was not until his cousin fell before him, on his knees at Finwe’s grave, that Fingon’s tortured breast reclaimed relief.)

He sleeps under the stars. Or: he pretends to. The wild whiteness of their remote fire maps out his guilt. He folds his hands; he does not pray. He _will_ pray, if it comes to that, but he cannot seek refuge in God without first answering the heavens himself.

Fingon waits until the world layers peace over the grief of the living, and rises. He knows many things—what he must do, and where to find Gwindor. What he must ask for, and where they must go. All this, before weeping. All this, before dawn.

Fingon has never looked back, when truth dug a grave and yet knelt beside it, waiting to be saved. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_Place_Riot


	4. and bore good will to all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am beyond grateful for your reviews and excitement. Thank you for your patience!

The west wing was open to its vaulted arches, and the bustling hall, arrayed with tables and easel-boards and not a few settles, was lit by a dozen windows at least twenty feet high. In some ways, it resembled a _stoa_ , updated and further enclosed for modern use. Above the hall were two more floors, and then a decidedly European turret, squared and crenellated in an exaggerated homage to battlements of old. The east wing was its mirror; the centerpiece of the whole, which faced Washington Square, was even more grand.

Fingon took note of all of this, despite a myriad more suitable claims on his attention. He had an eye for the grand and the ancient, because Turgon fancied himself an expert in architecture and Finrod had always loved history (if only to serve the whims of his current movement).

Maedhros, for his part, worshiped art.

Fingon trundled a handcart before him. It was somewhat intimidating to make a place here, knowing he wouldn’t have been there at all if not for the uncomfortable arrangements of fate.

Even when he reached his own small table, his hands shook a little in preparation. He had nothing particularly remarkable to demonstrate—he had brought his traveling chest (a gift from Doctor Olorin, and nearly forty years old, though Fingon had taken pains to fit it out freshly) and a few simple props to illustrate disinfectant. He had, too, the recent treatise he had helped edit. Doctor Olorin had written with the sharpest of pens to provide New York’s version of the Shattuck Report. It was entitled, _Public Health Cannot Come Too Soon_ , and though it was bound simply, Fingon had no doubt that it would one day decorate the shelves of every celebrated medical library, eliciting the utmost esteem.

Fingon would be twenty in three months. He had worn his most impressive collar today, in the hopes that his youth might not be immediately detectable.

 _You haven’t cared for such nonsense in a long while_ , he reminded himself ruefully. Not burdened by the pains of the past two years. Why, he’d been just eighteen when manhood had descended on him with full vengeance. First, his assistance to Olorin amidst the aftermath of public violence; then, a spectacle of private violence that had devoured all of his rosy futures—until one death had eclipsed his own importance, and brought him back down to earth.

Before the sorrows of two summers past, of course, he’d gone to Washington. Madame Nienna, an Austrian aristocrat who (thanks to her substantial fortune and remarkable acumen) had not let her sex restrain her from the pursuit of medicine and science, had ensured that his month studying and working at Columbian College was not spent in vain.

By the sunset of nineteen, Fingon had learned that one attained earthly happiness in pieces. Memory and future had to be considered, so as to stitch together a triptych of the whole. He had had his grandfather’s pride, upon returning from Washington, but not Maedhros’, because Maedhros was not in the city to _be_ proud.

Now Finwe was murdered and interred, a hero of memory—

And only now could Fingon have Maedhros again.

“Are you warm enough?” Fingon asks, into the wind. His voice cracks on the words. It is the first time he has spoken for a mile at least. The air is brisk, and his body remembers the cold warily, even though there is not so much as a frost on the ground.

From above the collar of his coat, Gwindor mutters, “Aye.”

Gwindor has been silent too. Maybe he regrets his haste, or Fingon’s haste. Yet that seems unlikely, if Fingon thinks back to the ghost hours of the morning.

Though none of the rescued thralls were charged with keeping watch, Fingon had found Gwindor standing at the waning fireside, with a cast of stony, secret thought upon his face.

It had taken less than half of Fingon’s argument to convince him.

_He is still alive, I can feel it in my heart._

_Lad, he’s—_

_I am going to him. Will you help show me the way? Or if not, will you at least keep quiet until I am well gone?_

Gwindor had nodded once, and followed him.

They slipped through the slumbering camp in silence. Finrod’s watch had ended—Fingon had waited for that. Had waited for his cousin to be asleep, to have relinquished his guard to less careful sentries.

Finrod…well, there was a danger that Finrod would insist on coming with him, expert at tracking and mapping that he was. Fingolfin needed Finrod, likely more than he needed Fingon. Finrod could not be lost or missing, when day dawned on the Feanorians’ stronghold.

Then, too, there was a chance that Finrod might not come. Fingon did not think he could bear it, to beg something of another cousin, to accept refusal like one more blow to the breastbone.

Getting away was tricky, but not impossible. Haleth’s camp had no dogs. Huan was on the other side of the lake. Dawn was inching up the sky when they passed through the thinning trees, half-a-mile from Mithrim. _Undetected_ , Fingon decided at last, and was struck a blow anyway—that of the horrible loneliness that comes with abandoning those fast asleep.

They are making good time, now. Their early progress was hampered not only by the need for stealth, but also by Fingon’s certainty that they should be well-stocked with supplies. There will be no opportunity, and more importantly, no time, to obtain any on the road.

So, to this end, he travels as doctor, warrior, and friend.

Gwindor returned from fetching the children with an extra coat slung over his arm. It had been intended for Maedhros. Fingon believes in fortune, which is from God, but not in luck. He brings the coat with them again, along with his satchel of tools. Maedhros will need that coat. The weather is harsher, in the mountains, even though this land shall never know the frigid violence of the midland plains.

To these, Fingon added as much ration as felt fair to claim, the flint he carries always, and a long knife, sheathed on his thigh. He has a gun, too, though he doesn’t like to use it. He has the deerskin gloves that Wachiwi bought for him at a trading post— _A doctor shouldn’t have stiff fingers_ , she said—

He wonders if they will be long enough for Maitimo’s hands.

(He has begun to think of him as _Maitimo_ again.)

The hall was choked with bodies and voices. One family came with half-a-dozen children, and Fingon was charmed out of his nerves. Children were always the most demanding audience, but Fingon had discovered, through his dealings with them, that his experience as an eldest brother was far from useless. They asked the hardest questions they could think of, and he answered them squarely and gravely.

Once, while Fingon treated a small boy who had weakness of the blood but not of spirits, and kept him busy with conversation, Fingon had seen Doctor Olorin hide a smile.

At last, these towheaded youngsters were herded away by their matriarch, and Fingon straightened the objects and papers through which their eager hands had rifled. His head thus lowered, he did not see the next visitor as his table until the visitor spoke.

“Disinfectant?” the man inquired, in a plummy baritone that reminded Fingon of Grandfather Finwe’s old council friends—condescending and imperious men who had not looked twice at children. “You really think this is the way of the future?”

“Many will die without it,” Fingon answered, and raising his gaze, he took a good look at the man.

“Oh, yes, I suppose they shall,” said the man, and he waved the largest hand Fingon had ever seen. Maedhros had large hands, too, because he was so tall—but his were slim-fingered and sharp-knuckled. This man’s were sleek and thick, overlong and gaudily beringed.

Other than the rings, and the hint of a silver watch-chain that was very fine and thin, he wore no ornament. His plain black coat, fully tailed, was untrimmed. So was the band of his high hat, and the head of his ebony cane. Yet he did not look _austere_. There was a decadence of manner that set Fingon’s teeth on edge. The man’s face was as pale as his smooth hands, and Fingon disliked his smile.

 _Remember what Olorin told you_ , he scolded himself, as he felt his back rise like the hackles of a cat. _You mustn’t take offense at public interest, or even public ignorance, if you wish to do good._

_But this wasn’t—_

“I do not take your meaning, I think,” said Fingon, as patiently as he could. “The master whom I assist—Doctor Olorin—emphasizes common, urgent needs. Uncleanliness is chief among the ills that bring about so much suffering, so many unnecessary deaths.”

“But is that not understood? Is it because you are an apprentice, that you must exhibit the obvious?”

The man _was_ insulting him. The smile _was_ mocking, and altogether too wide. Fingon had to tilt his chin up to meet the man’s eyes, because he was tall. Not as tall as Maedhros, Fingon was sure, but—close.

“I wish that it _was_ obvious, sir. Although we’ve been aware of various methods since—well, since ancient times, too few of our profession recognize the harm a filthy instrument can do, even now.”

“And so you speak of public health.” The man sounded bored. He thumbed at the corner of Olorin’s treatise. “So, my boy, tell me: will clean instruments save the rabble? Will you elevate our whores to fine ladies by tending to their diseased flesh with just the right touch of the carbolic?”

“A doctor does not seek to elevate his patients,” Fingon snapped. He did not think Doctor Olorin would chide him for that snap. “A good doctor does not see anyone in _need_ of redemption, when he is busy tending to their ills. That is not his province.”

“Oh, I think it is.” The smile widened, but it revealed no teeth. “You can dry a drunkard out, and call it medicine. You can restrain a whore to bedrest and call it a public service. But unless you acknowledge the root of their evils, they will always be just what they are. There is, you know, a reason for that.”

Fingon did not want to hear the reason, any more than he wanted to watch the wax-taper fingers flitting through his bottles and books. He should have mentioned, too, that Doctor Olorin did not rely on carbolic acid alone, because of how harshly it abraded skin and flesh. Indeed, that was Doctor Olorin’s whole purpose in cleaning instruments; to allow the burden of safety to rest on several prongs.

“Are you familiar,” the man asked, “With the science of phrenology?”

The town that they visited—where Fingon spoke French for the first time in what felt like an age—is now behind them. It is mid-morning. This is a land of foothills, and perhaps that is why Fingon can see so much sky. The bow-arc of sunrise has fired red and gold amid the blue, but both shades have faded. Winter seems silver, and near.

“We aren’t being followed,” he says, to Gwindor.

Gwindor’s knotted brow knots further still. “Who would be following us?”

Fingon swallows. “My father. My cousins.”

“They’d be fools,” Gwindor mutters. He raises a quick, sharp hand before Fingon can argue. “I’m not turning back, mind you. I’m just saying.”

“I know.” Fingon sets his jaw. He can be stubborn—for Maitimo, he can be very, very stubborn. “You think he’s…”

Gwindor passes a hand over his face. “I’m a fool, too.”

 _So he has hope_. Fingon hoists the satchel a little higher on his shoulder.

“He’s very clever,” he ventures. “Maitimo—Maed—Russandol. He’s very clever.”

“More of a weasel than anything else.” But Gwindor speaks fondly, so Fingon does not take umbrage. “He—he had a plan for everything, that one.”

Gwindor knew him. Knew him closer, in time, than Fingon.

“Yes, well.” Fingon is conscious of something that he carries, far heavier than anything in his pack. “He’s the eldest of us. Us cousins, that is.”

“How many are you?” Gwindor asks, but he must be looking at Fingon too carefully, because he shakes his head quickly. “Never mind. Not a safe question, these days.”

“It’s all right.” It isn’t, and it never will be. Not with little Argon—“I am the eldest of four. Finrod is, too. And Maedhros has six brothers.” He pauses, then: “Did…did he ever tell you about them?”

“Here and there.”

Fingon drags the tip of his tongue against the line of his teeth. If he looks at Gwindor, he sees a man battered and scarred by years of labor. If he thinks of Estrela—

He shudders, down in the pit of his soul. He doesn’t want to think of Estrela, now.

“How long were you—were you there?” It is a rude question. The doctor of a day earlier wouldn’t have asked it.

“It’s more’n five years, now.”

“And Maedhros was there…” He counts, in his mind, the dates his cousins unwillingly gave. “Six months?”

“I don’t know, exactly.” Gwindor eyes him, almost suspiciously. “What are you getting at?”

Fingon bites his lip. Gwindor looks away.

 _Tell me that they did not hurt him._ The desperate boy-heart that once throbbed, standing at the ashen sockets of a broken bridge had quailed in similar disbelief:

_Tell me that he did not hurt them._

Fingon gasps inward, for to breathe is to live.

“You don’t surprise me.”

“What?” Fingon dashes his sleeve across his eyes, catching a button in the strands of hair braided back at his temple.

“That he was the eldest.” Gwindor tucks his chin against his chest. They are both walking rapidly, not running, but making good time over the open land. It isn’t yet noon, and Fingon doesn’t want to make Maitimo wait another night. “He always had a soft spot for the children.”

The children—frightened, impish, resilient creatures, whom Maedhros had saved. Before Fingon knew who Russandol was, he knew that he had stayed behind to find them, had led them through distant wilderness. These children, he passed to Gwindor, while he himself was—

“I do not know them very well, yet,” Fingon answers. If his voice is a little too thick, a little too loud, but surely he can pin blame for that upon the wind. “But he was the leader of our games when we were small, and…and our favorite companion when we grew up. _My_ favorite companion. I—”

_—would have followed him anywhere, and I thought he would let me._

Without Gwindor, Fingon cannot even know where Maedhros _is_.

“Your lot came west, too.”

“Yes.”

“Later?”

“There was a…we were meant to travel together. All my family.” Fingon must not claim betrayal now. By rights, he must not even think of it—not while he leaves his father, his brother and sister behind. Every word is a choice between blood and blood. The anchor traced on his arm prickles; his fingers twitch against his palms with the memory of trying and failing to tend to Argon’s wounds. “It is very complicated,” Fingon says, feeling himself a coward. “But I—you seem to have known my cousin well.”

(He wants to know if Maedhros is still Maedhros.)

“We worked side-by-side, a fair amount. I wasn’t—sure of him, at first. But he was a hard man to dislike, as far as I’m concerned.” This is said almost fiercely.

“And you knew him well, in six months?”

A pause. “I wasn’t with him all that time.”

“Oh.” Fingon longs for idle, tender conversation, but he can’t have it. “Because—because you were not working in the same camp?”

Gwindor clears his throat. “Because he was in the mountain. With Bauglir.”

He had watched Maedhros crumble a biscuit into his tea a dozen times, at parlors like this, and though the habit was a nervous one (and therefore something of a warning), Fingon steadied himself against the familiarity of it.

“Maman did not mind at all,” he said, with a cheerful smile. “And neither did I. You were unwell, the other day! I could not expect you to turn up, out of sorts, while I was championing public health, of all things!”

“I could have been a live specimen,” Maedhros suggested, with a paper-twist of a smile. “You’re too kind, Fingon. You’re always too kind.” He had decimated the biscuit, but he did not reach for another. “We shall go back to your quarters after this, shan’t we? I know you’ve a dozen things to teach me. I promise I shall be a faithful student.”

Not as many as a dozen, but if there was enough time, Fingon could show him the rubber breathing bags of nitrous oxide, which had been too cumbersome to display at the exhibit. Doctor Olorin was keen, of late, on nitrous oxide.

“I should like that very much.” Fingon reached for another biscuit. He didn’t crumble it in his tea, however; he ate it. “Say, you didn’t miss much—half the time I stood at my little table, I was occupied by the worst boor I’ve ever encountered.”

“Worse even than that old professor you had such grievance with?”

“Funny you should mention him.” Fingon jabbed a delighted finger. It was easy, to poke fun at the world with Maedhros. “They were on about the same hogwash. _Phrenology_ , if you can believe it. I could have sworn we laughed _that_ off the continent five years ago! At least, so I told anyone at my lectures who would listen. But old MacGregor isn’t the only one trading in the vile stuff. This fellow—oh, Maitimo, I wish you could have seen him. He was like—like a magpie! All black and white and cold bird-eyes. Grinning and beak-clapping like one, too. Apologies. Am I too hard?”

He stopped, for Maedhros was not laughing. He had gone quite pale, and his lower lip was drawn between his teeth. But as soon as Fingon ceased to speak, he smiled, and reached for his desecrated tea.

“Do go on,” said Maedhros, setting down the cup. “It is most diverting. You shall have no scolding from me.”

It was not long after— _nothing_ was long after, of course—that Melkor Bauglir was commissioned to oversee the railroad, and Fingolfin traveled north. Fingon had heard the name Bauglir, but it had fallen mostly from his uncle’s lips. Feanor was convinced, or consumed, by his own madcap theory: that Bauglir had killed Finwe. It never mattered to Feanor that the killer had confessed. Indeed, the convicted man had been one of the Irish thugs who rioted outside of Astor Place. He had admitted, in his confession, that he did not take kindly to another Irishman’s elite and English sympathies.

 _He was a great man_ , Fingon heard said, by his own father to Finwe’s mourning friends. _Of course, great men have enemies_.

Still, by the time Fingon saw a printed photograph of Feanor’s suspect in the newspaper, the world had changed. Fingolfin might not charge _murder_ to Bauglir’s name, but he did not trust him.

Had never trusted him, it seemed.

Fingon, for his part, had gazed upon the long white face in a sea of ink-darkness, feeling his old laughter curdle a little inside him.

And yet for all that, it hadn’t occurred to him, to think of what Maedhros might have known. 

“I still don’t understand.” Fingon does not wish to, really. He is stretching out his hand in the dark, for something that will only cause him pain. Yes, here is sunlight ahead of him, and sunlight behind him, but all through his heart there are shadows, keeping the past safe. “Why Bauglir…”

“I know very little.” In the past hour, Gwindor has begun to take the lead, veering towards the curling fingers of forest that drag down from the hills in wandering strokes. Fingon saw only the railroad, of course; he does not know where lies the stronghold of Bauglir, or the camp where the slaves were kept. “Seems Russandol was taken afore summer. It was getting on autumn when he was sent down to us.”

“But he was able to work.”

“What?”

Fingon raises his voice. “He was able to work, when he came to you.”

Gwindor’s face twists, then sets again. He doesn’t answer. “There.” He points. “That valley is a riverbed. When we reach it, we can follow it in and up. Camp’s destroyed…we’ll have to make for the peak. Christ, what a plan.”

They have not even stopped to eat, nor to rest. Only once or twice have they paused to relieve themselves in the thickets. Fingon gazes out beyond the hills, all the way to where the flanks of the great mountain are chalk-marred with snow.

“Have you ever seen Bauglir?”

“I have.”

“I have, also.” Fingon grits his teeth. “In New York. He was a crooked statesman there, or at least he tried to be. Luck has favored him. Luck, and wealth.”

“He’s lower than the scum at the bottom of a well.” When Gwindor shrugs, he does so unevenly, because of his shoulder. “But he’s dangerous. You know that, don’t you? Don’t you, young doctor? He’s dangerous as a demon, and worse, for he’s a man.”

Fingon _will not be afraid of anyone_. “Yes. And we are fools.”

“True enough.”

Resolutely, Fingon shades his brow. It feels like a duty, to be blinded by sun on snow. With the cautious nobility of straightened shoulders, he dares to ask, “What did he want with Maedhros?”

“Do you want to know?”

(But it isn’t about wanting.)

Gwindor says, heavily, “I don’t know the monster’s mind. I think he tried to tame him. Tame Russandol. He failed.”

_They will always be just what they are…_

“Of course he did.” Fingon rides a surge of fire-brightness. “Maitimo never let anyone but his father—I mean, he wouldn’t have given in. No matter what this cursed Bauglir wanted, Maedhros wouldn’t have _flinched_.”

Gwindor makes a strange, broken sound, muffled in his coat. Then he says, very gruffly, “Be that as it may, he can’t walk now. Since you’re pressing at the wound, you might as well know.”

Fingon has jerked to a halt. He is a fool, he knows he’s a fool, but he still wants someone to save him from the leaps he takes. He still wants a firm hand on his shoulder—his father, perhaps, but most of all Maedhros, telling him that all shall be well…

…and that folly is not a fatal sin, so long as one is brave.

“Why cannot—” His voice breaks the fall. “Why can’t he walk?”

“He snapped his leg in a prize fight. More or less.”

“A prize fight?”

“Slaves is chattel. They made sport of us. Tell me you can’t see it. How he would have stuck out above the rest.”

Fingon’s eyes water. The sun gives little warmth, but it glares. “Yet he managed to bring the children halfway down the mountain to you,” he says, stubbornly. “It’s a long way, and there were _two_ of them.”

Gwindor’s hands are fists against his sides. Fingon watches those fingers loosen, as if from far away. He believes it must be mercy, that release.

“I never said,” Gwindor concedes (a truce), “That he wasn’t a fucking stubborn cusser.”

Fingon-in-the-dark closes his hand around this, grateful and foolish. “You and I can carry him,” he proposes. His voice is watery now, too.

Gwindor steps back, and close, and puts a hand on Fingon’s shoulder.

“All right,” he agrees. Raspy, but sure. “All right.”

He washed himself, knowing that Olorin would not judge him for it. Olorin never pretended that compassion required an abandonment of cleanliness. Fingon’s tears salted his cheeks, and he splashed fresh water on his face, so as to hide them. He was miles away from the happy nerves preceding his display at the exhibition, or his righteous outrage thereafter.

Absolute _miles_.

Fingon had made no complaint, when Olorin informed him that they would be going into the slums near Five Points. The City was a crammed place; good and bad were determined by the end of one street and the beginning of another, sometimes. Fingon had seen the fancy ladies peddling themselves as wares. Fingon had seen beggars, and tended to them.

Fingon had stood to the side of a riot, waiting to heal.

She was far beyond the false beauty of consumption. Blood ringed her mouth and her face waned wax-pale. Her eyes were closed.

“I shall prepare a compress,” Olorin said. “Fingon, sit with her.”

The room was filthy and rank. The bed was over-large; a clotheshorse of ragged finery hulked nearby. Fingon knew what the room had once been used for.

He sat down beside her, and took her hand, feeling for the feverish pulse.

He would disinfect himself and launder his clothing later, he decided. The thought was his first warning; he did not usually have to remind himself of the ordinary course of things.

She opened her eyes, and made a few, fluttering noises. Fingon realized, with dawning pity, that she was trying to speak.

He tried to smile, behind his herb-soaked mask. He looked into her wide, dying eyes—

_…unless you acknowledge the root of their evils, they will always be just what they are._

Hours later, when the woman was dead and prayed over, Fingon was still scrubbing at his shame.

They are near the river when the shrieking begins. Fingon is startled half out of his skin, but Gwindor shakes his head.

“Just birds, is all,” he says. “Magpies.”

“Lord,” Fingon says, with a faint laugh, “Anything will do me, it seems.”

The river isn’t wide. Fingon himself crossed it, farther west, and thought it no hardship. Now it is a silver thread in a map of hope, and he is glad to see it.

Beside the river, a dozen of the chattering birds flock in a circle, making a tremendous noise. They do not fly away, even when Gwindor and Fingon draw near. They are black and white, as are all their kind, but their beaks are bright yellow.

One lies dead in the center of their little throng, its claws drawn piteously to its ruffled breast.

“I ain’t seen that before, I’ll admit,” Gwindor says.

Fingon says, “My cousin Finrod is something of a naturalist. I think I recall—yes, I mean I don’t know if birds were the same as other creatures, but some animals hold funerals for their dead.”

Their eyes meet. Gwindor’s lips tighten to a firm white line.

“East,” he says, changing the subject. “We go east, along the water, from here.”

The sky is stretched thin by streaked banner colors, fading in late afternoon.

“Where did you—” Fingon has several ways in which he could ask the question, but mercy makes him pause, and really think. “Where did you recover the children?”

“There.” Gwindor mutters, pointing to the edge of the trees.

The chill in the air. The slender evergreens. The song of the water. Fingon wants to shut his eyes, and see Maedhros, walking this world.

But Maedhros cannot walk.

“Keep going,” Gwindor says, almost to himself.

_Fingon. Fingon. She did not know. She only knew that you were with her._

Those words, he would turn over his mind, instead of Uncle Feanor’s, instead of the magpie man’s smirking falsities.

Fingon could find comfort, and reassurance now—for, despite all his flaws, he was confident again that it had _not_ been a crime to follow his calling. He had not done harm, even when his soul was in turmoil. Spring was coming, dawning on a year in which no tragedy yet had struck them. Spring was coming, and Maedhros had promised that the slings and arrows of a cynic’s cruelty could not change that which was good.

Maedhros hadn’t even known what he was fighting, in Fingon. He hadn’t needed to; he always chose the best words from his heart, for the hearts of those around him.

_She died in the kindest arms I know._

The trees invite them into bracken-rusted dusk. Fingon keeps one hand on his knife, and strains his eyes. Maedhros won’t be here, of course. Maedhros will be…will likely be in the mountain, but that doesn’t mean Fingon won’t find traces. Even with a lame leg, Maedhros would have put up a tremendous fight.

Fingon takes a few steps up the little rise, where a small waterfall plummets merrily into the river’s stream. Then he realizes that Gwindor is not following him.

“Gwindor,” he says, over his shoulder. “What is it? What’s amiss?”

“Nothing.” It is almost a growl, but the man lifts his feet.

They go on like this for some time, under the dark eaves, under the woven thatch, and through the rich, dead air, while the river’s voice runs down to stillness behind them.

“I can’t,” Gwindor says, just as Fingon is beginning to pray. Exhaustion is gnawing at the edges of his spirit, reminding him that kindness was not enough to save his mother, to save his brother, to keep his father from grief.

“What?”

Gwindor is only a shape in the night, now. He says, “I can’t go on. I thought I could—Damn it all, I’m sorry.”

The roar in Fingon’s ears is fear, but he will not name it. He retraces his steps. He puts a hand on the man’s good shoulder. “No need to be sorry,” he says. “You told me I was a fool, and you were right. I’ll go on alone, if—if you need me to.”

“You don’t understand,” Gwindor chokes. “God…” He heaves a shuddering breath. “Who do I think I’m praying to?”

“What don’t I understand?”

 _I am sure,_ cano.

“They ruined him,” Gwindor whispers. “They ruined him, and he lived. They won’t have let him live this time. They _won’t_.”

Fingon once struck a man who boasted of a bullet. Fingon once dreamed of dancing, when his hands and feet froze in the endless night. Fingon is the sum of his mad family, with all their bold brilliance traded away. There is nothing left of him except what has belonged to him always. A stubborn will. Eyes that will both weep readily, and yet force themselves shut instead of watching the world end.

“He was alive when you saw him,” Fingon says. “I cannot leave him, Gwindor, until I know for certain that—that there’s no saving him. I can’t leave Maitimo. Ever.”

Gwindor sobs. Fingon holds him. Holds the twisted shoulders in his doctor’s arms.

He wonders how much Maedhros really knew.

“So I must follow the river, until I come to a forge?”

“It’s more a cave, really. And burned out, I understand.” Gwindor gasps out a sharp laugh. “But you’ll know. Full of metal and ash. From there, you head on up the side of the mountain—it’s a steep road, but clear. Only, have a care Fingon. It’s their road, not ours.”

“I shall be on my guard.”

“You can’t get into the mountain, lad. You could get close. But it’s—it’s a wall of stone, with eyes at every hole. You’re killing yourself.”

“You’re not responsible for my life, Gwindor. I’m only sorry to have made you come this far. I—I am blind, I know. But I can only do what I know I must, and it doesn’t have to be…reasonable to anyone else. When he was at his best—I mean, the Russandol you know. _He_ would have done this for me.”

Very softly—“He’d have done it for anyone.”

The roaring leaves his ears. He isn’t afraid; he _knew_ he wouldn’t be afraid, no matter what happened. “Can you travel back safely?” Fingon asks, holding his head high.

Gwindor sinks down, his arms dragging over his knees. “I’ll wait,” he says. “It’s the least I can do, when you…”

“Oh, Gwindor. You mustn’t risk yourself further.”

“He’d have done it for anyone. Even me.”

Tears are pricking at Fingon’s eyes, now. That is to be expected. Sometimes, he is still young. “You are his friend,” he says. “And you’ll see him again. If I live, Gwindor, you’ll see us both again.”

Fingon runs until the wind sleeping in the treetops roars in his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yellow-billed magpies do indeed have funeral rituals.
> 
> Also more info about the Shattuck report here: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cphl/history/books/sr/


	5. and then he could go no farther

The arm of a gun, hollow, raised skyward, and too far away to be rightly seen, except as a memory cornered in a smile. Violence, made safe by an angle. Shot and the salute, both of them parting. Wind rushing in the ears of those staying and leaving—

Both of them parting.

There were words that would last forever, and words that were not meant to. The two, when the same, should be painful.

_Just a child’s worries—that letting all of you out of my sight means I won’t be able to find you._

Fingon follows the river. He wishes he knew more, but that is an old story: one that he has no time to tell, and no one to tell it to, save himself.

Gwindor was afraid. Fingon has seen men broken, and has been broken himself (coming out of a frost-stilled stupor, blindly thinking that he was among _all_ his family again), but he cannot pretend that grief supersedes all fear. Loss is not always a totality.

There may still be horrors, lurking in the dark.

It is growing dark, now. It is evening, and the year is very old. Fingon prays, first in French, to remember his mother, and then in Latin, and finally in what mumbled words of Gaelic he can recall—

Because he believes that Maedhros is still alive.

Somewhere, somewhere near, Maedhros is living.

_I mean it,_ cano _, it was right risky of you to bring this yourself! There are thieves on these roads. I know we don’t like to own it, but our lands aren’t always as safe as we might wish…_

And Fingon felt guilty, all of a sudden, because Maedhros must be thinking of Grandfather Finwe, even though _he_ hadn’t been shot by a robber or a vagrant. No—the man who split his skull had been angry at what he believed.

 _I am here now_ , Fingon said, shamefaced. He’d hoped (he realized now) to be thought bold and ready, in a manner that not even Maedhros had seen before, from him.

Fingon’s doctoring was rarely visible, in its entirety, to the family. He had done much of it out of sight, and had valued the demands of the profession too much to seek honor regarding it.

But riding north with saddlebags of gold, brashly certain that he would reach his destination unharmed…now _that_ had seemed like the sort of thing a Feanorian would do. The sort of thing that could win a _little_ praise.

Maybe after all this time, he still wanted to be one of them. He’d been angry (or close to it), bitter (or close to it), and he’d pretended for the space of a few lonely months that being his own man was an entirely different venture than…why, than anything he and his friend-cousin had undertaken together.

But now they were going west, and Fingon was relieved.

There would be no more waiting of the soul. These months would pass, and then they would be their own men _together_ , bound in friendship and blood and common cause.

 _Athair will be grateful_ , Maedhros promised, the furrow in his brow fading. _And if he knew you’d ridden alone, I daresay he’d be impressed._

There. That was something.

In walking, in keeping to his path, Fingon passes from the living to the dead.

Trees, that is. In the last light, with his brave words to Gwindor still ringing in his ears, he enters a forest of naked bone-branches. The trunks of these trees are exposed and faded; their boughs are without either leaves or needles. The wind has stripped them grey and raw.

Like skeletons, then, they stand parched, even though they stand at the edge of the river.

Fire, perhaps, or drought has made them so. They bear the scars of time and ill luck. Fingon swallows against his dry throat.

He is not—he is _not_ a slave to superstition and doubt. He will not be frightened by what cannot hurt him.

He is not Gwindor; he must be _strong_ for Gwindor. (Gwindor was afraid.)

If horrors wait for him, they will live and breathe, fight and be fought. Fingon resumes his prayers, but he prays them silently, letting the words flow in the confines of his mind, keeping time with the trickle of the river.

_If you find him…_

_I will._

_If you find him, you may not know him. Think of Estrela; think of the look you left on Gwindor’s face._

Fingon blinks through a haze of tears, stranded between the halves of an _Ave Maria_. He stumbles over a root, and stops short to consider. Walking among the dead trees will open up the forest to the sky, at least. That way, he will be able to see better; to travel more quickly.

Choosing death to save a life.

There is something in that which strengthens him. He adjusts his satchel-strap, and tramples his next steps.

_Is there anything of mine you’d like to have?_

_What?_

_We’ve packed the attic to bursting._ He grinned, golden. How could a smile be the same as the sun? _It seems a waste to leave it all here, when it shall be years before we can get at it again—and I’m in a generous mood. Come now, I know you’ve always coveted my hats. Don’t deny it._

 _I haven’t!_ Fingon protested, laughing. _I am content with a doctor’s plain garb, I swear._

 _Nonetheless, I have something to give you_ , Maedhros said warmly. _Whether it is your wish or not._

He has a small lantern, with cotton wrapped protectively around its glass bowl, and a flask of fuel tucked beside it. Despite a fearful prick of longing, for warmth and flame, Fingon doubts the wisdom of using it now. He must rely on stealth, while he can (Wachiwi and Beren have spent many hours teaching him to walk more quietly), and he must not waste precious light when he may need it later.

Maedhros will be wounded. He will need a doctor’s hands before a friend’s words can comfort him. Fingon has resigned himself to that.

In his memory, Doctor Olorin commands: _think of what you know._

There are names that Fingon, newcomer that he is, _cannot_ know. Gwindor said that Maedhros was taken by Mairon the Hunter, and as such, he despaired of him.

But when Gwindor spoke of Bauglir, it was with the same twist of hatred that Fingon once saw in his uncle’s face.

Mairon and Bauglir. Which is the devil, and which is roaring hell?

He turns the sickness of this choice over and over in his thoughts, and in the end, he decides that all of it—all of Gwindor’s fear—tells him very little. What matters, at present, is how long he must creep along by moonlight: nothing else.

The river finally escapes the graveyard of bone-branches. Fingon’s sight has grown used to the dimness, and he reminds himself to be grateful for the cover of the forest. Also, where sight fails, the other senses strengthen. 

(There may still be horrors, lurking in the dark.)

On the chilly breeze, he catches the faint scent of roasted meat.

_No,_ Fingon breathed, in wonderment and denial both. _No, Maitimo. I couldn’t. It’s—_

_You know exactly what it is. Remember when you came and attended me, better than any doctor twice or…Lord, thrice your age? You made me well again, for a time._

Fingon repeated, _For a time._

 _Time is the master of us all,_ Maedhros said, laughing gently, that the words might not be bitter—or too true. It was afternoon; the light was like a blessing. _Take the watch, Fingon. Keep it for me, since I’m sure to toss it from my pocket as soon as Alexander turns up his first stone._ Then he held out that exquisite silver thing, made by his father, carried proudly for years—and he dropped it into Fingon’s slowly reaching hand.

Fingon has kept the watch, and would not burn the fiddle. His heart is always caught between love and loyalty.

Between Maedhros and Maitimo.

Fingon hears the cougar before he sees it, for the cat is feeding and thus not overly concerned with stealth. It is a vast, smooth-bodied predator, black in the darkness, yet visible in the small clearing in which Fingon finds it. Its head and ears are rounded, like the most insolent of tomcats. It is larger than a wolfhound—or at least, larger than the only wolfhound Fingon knows. Its paws are the size of a man’s hands.

It gnaws, complacently, at bones.

Fingon goes very still.

Under the moonlight, there is more to be seen: the traces of a campfire, evidenced by a few charred logs. The turned-up ground, muddied by a thin sheet of melting snow.

The cougar lifts its stout, strong neck. Its eyes flare and reflect. Yellow, white: the flame and the flame’s unyielding core.

“Easy now,” Fingon says. He has a gun. He has a lantern. He doesn’t know how much—how much _time_ he has.

There _were_ big cats in the east. Celegorm said he’d seen one once. Fingon won’t give Celegorm—even in thought—the satisfaction of wanting him at his side. He does not need Maedhros’ brothers, who would not so much as look for him. He knows that the trick is to be calm, and strong, and to fight if he must.

Animals are simpler, after all, than men.

“Easy,” Fingon says again. “I don’t mean you any harm. And you’ve already eaten. I don’t suppose…I don’t suppose you’d like _me_. I’m tough as leather. I mean no insult, of course, to your teeth.”

The cougar stretches, just as a tomcat would. It laps at its chops with a sinuous tongue—Fingon imagines it to be pink and prickled, but of course he cannot see it very well—and then it saunters away, its tail dancing lazily behind it.

Fingon breathes.

He hadn’t realized how keen his nose had become, in months of hunger and hunting. When Fingon feels it safe to crouch next to the ash-heap, he finds that they are thoroughly damp and more than a day old.

Still, he smelled the memory of meat. Still, someone camped here. He feels that Gwindor would have mentioned if he had...but no, Gwindor did not come so far.

A thrill swells in Fingon’s breast. Maedhros had children with him, and the air was cold—did he risk the scent and smoke and sight of a fire, to keep them warm?

“My _dear_ , foolish Maitimo,” he murmurs, liking the idea better than he should. He is desperate for any sign. Even a foolish one.

The clearing is a gift. His eyes have adjusted well; the world is no longer cast in shades of black alone. Grey and sober blue hover between the treetops and the sky. The stars hang silver, far above, and Fingon turns his face up towards them.

Did Maedhros do the same?

Since he cannot linger here in the day, he must be quick about learning the history of this place. He feels about with his hands and feet, hoping to turn up more than mud.

It is an almost futile exercise. All he finds is a short, frayed length of rope.

Fingon casts the rope aside, since it cannot tell him much else than that which he already knows: someone was _here_. He takes a few careful steps outward, moving to the edge of the clearing, and then he nearly trips.

His attacker is a stake in the ground. It is as thick around as a finger, but buried so deeply and so firmly that Fingon cannot easily drag it up.

On the ground beside it: another length of rope.

Fingon lifts it between his fingers. The end is smoothly shorn.

Lengths of rope, knife-cut, and a stake in the ground.

He rises, cleaning his hands on his coat. The cougar could always return; cats hunt from behind.

Fingon finds three more stakes. 

His mind stops short of asking what they mean. This is not his first warning. _Are you afraid?_ asks the gloating magpie memory, even though the man with the jester’s white face never said as much to Fingon. Fingon stands, and swallows hard against a lump in his throat that threatens to stop his breathing short along with his thoughts.

 _Go on_ , he commands himself. _Go on._

_But what if there is more to find, here?_

_Go on. You cannot delay any longer._

It was their last meal together. Fingon couldn’t have known that, then. All of Formenos’ garden bounty, spilling over the long table—and Maedhros nimbly filching the best slices of chicken, the brightest lettuce, to heap on Fingon’s plate. It was a memory only within a string of such memories. The lure of the wild and the sweetness of home. That was Formenos, as Fingon wished it to be.

 _We must see about Athair making_ you _a gun_ , Maedhros suggested, low, and with a sly grin. _I won’t have all my teaching wasted on an inferior piece._

 _I_ am _inferior, though,_ Fingon sighed, stabbing a recalcitrant green sprig with his fork. Manners need not be so delicate, here. _I haven’t had much time to practice. The ranges in the city are fearfully crowded._

Anyway, the watch was gift enough. Duty enough.

 _No trouble_ , said Maedhros. _We will all be marksmen, given enough targets._

Targets enough, to be sure of a kill.

Fingon readies his gun. He can hear the river murmuring behind him; he is walking northwest now. Walking as the forest grew, grasping at the roots of the mountain.

He knows this because Finrod taught him how to orient himself, according to the stars.

_But where does the mountain begin?_

_Where will the forest leave you?_

In every fairy story that Fingon loved as a child, in every myth, forests were secret places where children and knights alike must face the unknown. A child might be lost or abandoned. A knight might be sent on a quest with every odd against him.

Still, there was hope. Still, there is light above the rooves of bracken.

 _The white way,_ Beren told him once, when they were far from winter, but still a greater distance from Mithrim than they believed. _The souls of the dead are wandering, there. The white way is their path._

Stars, deep in the sky. Fingon, deep in the forest. The wind, yes, is a voice in the trees, but only because the trees offer it dimension.

_The white way is their path._

Fingon has been running from this forest, even while he passes through it. He has trusted the stars without trusting their foretold tragedies. Fingon is not like a child, for a child would retain his innate closeness to the things of earth. Fingon is not like a knight, because a knight would have slain a beast already.

(What did the stakes in the ground— _mean_ —)

An hour, maybe more, spent in in the pine, pitch darkness. Then at last, as the moon peels shade and cloud from its pearled self, the trees recede.

Fingon breathes different air. Smoke hangs here too, as if the wind has clung to a memory. 

Perhaps the memory was not meant to be a memory, except in the long string, the severed rope of someone else’s story.

_If I die here_ , Fingon thinks, numbly, facing the black mouth of a cavern; the leer of the mountain’s biting roots, _I shall be very angry with myself._

The remnant of burning is foul. It is an oil smell, a stone smell, but also it is the smell of flesh and hair and bone. That is a stench that lingers, for noses less keen than Fingon’s, even.

When he caught that first whiff in the woodland clearing, he imagined:

A meal, a fire. Warmth.

Lost children.

(Before he fled—he looked. Two strides, only, carrying him past the scattered ashes as if they were a point on a map-line. As if they marked the way he had already meant to go.

The bones were too…too small. A ribcage, maybe a pig’s. _Too small_.)

Fingon could not (dared not) delay any longer.

This is where the mountain begins.

(He does not go into the leering mouth. He sets his own teeth instead.)

(Stubborn. He’s always been stubborn.)

The path that climbs is a stairstep of uneven flats. Even before it narrows, perilously, a horse could not manage it. It is a difficult truth of hard travel, Fingon reflects. One must often leave loyal animals behind.

_Fingon. We go together. We will hunt, and track too, and ford many rivers. We’ll climb mountains._

Fingon leaves the valley and the forest and the sickly smoke. He leaves them as if they are animals, as if the forest hid a thousand eyes, watching and yearning. As if the valley ached with hunger, and would have snapped its teeth at him, given the chance.

_We’ll climb mountains._

It is not as cold as death or true winter. Fingon has a coat, and months of memory to guard him. He has not eaten, but he is not hungry. He has gloves for himself and for Maedhros. He will not stop, or think of stopping.

Still, he shivers when the snow begins to fall.

He parted from Gwindor in the evening. It is after midnight, now. The moon answers the questions he justly asks, because the moon is generous in what it— _she—_ can give.

 _She is a goddess, to my people_ , Beren explained. Wachiwi had nodded.

_A god, for mine._

_There is a faithfulness, about the moon_ , Fingon had agreed, feeling a touch of awkwardness, as he always did when he was speaking with a clumsy poet’s tongue. _A comfort._

And they had both nodded.

The moon is too far away to be of any comfort, here. Night is too near. Sleep is the enemy, yet it is the only companion he still has.

But: Fingon fought off sleep amidst the ice and snow, to keep from dying, and he can do so again in the long hours of need.

Accordingly, his heavy weariness is something that he can—he _must_ —hold outside himself. The moon has permitted him to keep his lantern stowed, and he imagines folding his weariness up and wrapping it in more soft cotton, so that it will not break.

_No time._

He thanks the moon shyly. Not a proper prayer. The moon is lost in the clouds, anyway; in the soft bondage of the blizzard blur.

As the snow swirls, and the wind speaks, Fingon narrows his eyes and sets one foot in front of the other. _Forget the champions of night_ , he chides himself. _Contend instead with what the earth can tell you. This is a path that others have used before. Maybe Maedhros. Maybe the men who took him._

Yellow, gleaming. Cat-eyes in the frost-floating dark.

_Do you really believe they were men?_

The darkness becomes the pupil only: it is the world that is all flaring, gorging gaze. And like that, Fingon must drag the back of one frosty sleeve across his frozen lashes, to clear his sight again.

_They weren’t men you know they aren’t men they will have ruined him by now will you even know him well enough to know his body—_

The wind does not cease whispering. It wails like a woman and moans like a black-lipped wolf. It chitters like a swarm of locusts, devouring. That gaping cavern at the foot of Diablo was the place where Gwindor and Maedhros had worked, just as Gwindor had said he would find it. Maedhros had killed men there, to save the slaves.

(Death, to save from death.)

(Devouring. Death is always devouring.)

Fingon swore he wouldn’t freeze. It doesn’t matter if snow falls and the breath is torn from him. This world will not rage cold enough to bring him to his knees.

_You are grateful? For the knowledge that he had strength left to kill?_

_It shall be more than two months until I see you again._ He did not reach to embrace Fingon; it was a casual farewell, an almost-promise. It had seemed like a promise when he said it. _Then only think—we shall discover new stars each night. Finrod assures me that they burn fiercer in heaven than they do here. There are no cities in the mountains, after all._

_Why is it always stars? Why did we spend our years of friendship, lying the same lies? Speaking of the constants of the world as if we were among them?_

_If he had strength left—perhaps he escaped—_

Yes, Fingon would rather be a fool than a liar.

Where does that leave him?

(He did thank the moon.)

Fingon bit his tongue. Fingon did not speak of stars. Fingon said, _I have the strangest fear._

In his hands, in his hands, in his hands, turning—

—shining—

_A fear?_

Because winter has slipped its blades in early, to embattle and blind him, Fingon is not favored as he was in the forest glen, with shades of silver and deep blue to make sense of his surroundings. He must instead layer black over black again; must tread cautiously with numb, booted feet so that he does not tumble over the embankment into an early grave. He reaches out to his right side, the side where the stone rises in a split and cragged wall. He holds to it, as fiercely as he can, whenever he can.

But he shudders, violently (violence is all in the angles, when one is climbing rocks). He shudders, and the cougar comes back. Teeth, eyes, tenfold. It purrs in his ears until his eardrums burst. He must sob and choke, unhearing, into the damp, unforgiving leather that creases around his elbow.

 _Let me pass_ , he prays, to God, who is real _if believed in_ , and to the cat, which is…not _real_ , exactly, but not as easily put away as his weariness.

_Let me pass. I am not finished, yet. I am not ready to die._

He is very high on Diablo’s flanks, very high in the thin cold air and on the shale-hard ground, when the snow stops falling.

_Thank you,_ Fingon said, as much for the hand helping him into the saddle as for the reassuring words. As much for the parcel of bread and apples as for the smile, deep-dimpled, that flashed on Maedhros’ face. As much for the watch, although it counted hours gone.

He wouldn’t see Formenos again.

That stung him, but it seemed unjust to his family to say so. To say, _I wish the past was something we could keep._

Was not that _why_ they were to be happy? To live, in letting go?

_I have come all this way, sir, and I’ll be damned if you ruin it now! Don’t ruin it, Maitimo. Don’t break this—this promise too. I know it wasn’t yours. I know it was just my promise, and perhaps…well, perhaps you’ve never cared for my words. Oh, hang it all. You do. You_ must _. And no matter what you feel, no matter what horrors you’ve faced—we’ll make it right together. If you’ll only stay alive. Fight a little longer, my friend._

_Fight a little longer._

_I’ll see you—_

_On the other side, cano!_

From above, as the eagle flies, Fingon was a mote, a crawling ant. He climbed the path that Morgoth made and used to reach the forge and forest quickly. The builders had given it wormholes to enter and exit from; they had been less respectful of the bones of the mountain. Fingon did not know—would never know—how close he came to poised avalanches; to murmuring quakes and faults. He was borne along by busy feet and a noble mind. These carried him, and guarded him, until he reached the end.

The end was not the end, so far as Morgoth was concerned: it was merely where the path went flat, curving close and serpent-narrow around the sheer face of Diablo, behind which were his cellars and cells, above which were his private rooms. Not so far, now, from Fingon, was the long hall full of stolen masterpieces. The room where they had taken his boy-cousin and cut him into a suffering remnant of manhood.

Maeglin was weeping in his little bed, as he had each night since he was called to attend the slaughter. The master of the mountain and his cruel servants were hidden, as they chose to be, from night’s gaze.

But here was Fingon. He had come all the way from Formenos, in a way.

All the way from home.

The arm of a gun, hollow, raised skyward, shone in the light. ( _On the other side, I have the strangest fear, do you honestly think I could stay alive…if I didn’t have you?_ )

What looks like an arm, or the hollow shadow of one, is raised against rock. Its lifted hand is shining, too.

All Fingon can see is the weapon.

That is why, when he cries out, he calls Maitimo’s name.

(There were names that would last forever, and names that were not meant to.)


	6. he wept when he saw the cruel device

“They shall not die,” I said, crouching at an awkward height so as to keep my dancing breeches clean. “Really, Celegorm. They look very healthy and plump.”

Celegorm regarded me with a sharp eye, but for once his glance was not of judgment. Rather, it was of appraisal.

“I have kept her well-fed myself,” he answered me, reaching out with one rough hand to ruffle the mother’s weary head. “I have spoken to—a farmer, who lives nearby, and he knew a great deal about what nutrients are suitable for a bitch near to whelping.”

Her name was Breena. I knew that, because when I used to visit during the summers, she was Maedhros’ dog. He could not have one in the city; there was nowhere for a long-legged creature to run.

I, in my blockheaded way, had not thought to consider whether Maedhros missed his old companion. Not until I saw the way Celegorm was almost—tender, with her.

“She looks healthy also,” I said. “I am not a master of animal husbandry, cousin. You know this.”

He snorted. “Yes, well, how much more complex can a dog be than a human?”

“Hardly half so much?”

“What a fool you are, Fingon,” he said, but there was no venom in it. “Look you here—” and he lifted what I thought was the ugliest of the swarming puppies, with a head much too large for its body, “This one. Do you see how he mewls?”

“Yes.” I stroked its snubbed grey nose with a finger, in apology for my dismissive thoughts. “They are all mewling.”

“Because they are babies, and can think of nothing but milk,” Celegorm agreed triumphantly. “The twins were exactly the same. But the twins shall grow into men, with dull cares, and yet this little creature—he will always be free. He will grow fierce, while we go to fat and taxes.”

I stifled a laugh, surprised.

Laughter rang out anyway. And there was Maedhros, come to rescue me.

“What’s so funny?” Celegorm demanded.

“You are teaching Fingon your philosophy, I hear.”

“It is not a philosophy,” Celegorm retorted, brandishing a pup at his brother. Maedhros took it, and lifted its downy head to his cheek.

“I think it is. And a good one.”

I was at once out of place again, between them. Maedhros always made certain to speak my language—mine and my family’s, really, for my brothers and sister loved him too—but I did not think I should ever learn the secret ways of the Feanorians.

“I have told Celegorm that they have sound constitutions,” I interjected, straightening up. “And their mother, as well.”

“Ah, Breena,” said Maitimo, and he stepped forward to tuck the little one against her side, and scratch her between the ears with his long fingers. “You have a better master now, don’t you, old girl?”

Celegorm frowned. “You are still her master,” he said. “If Athair lets me keep one, I’ll have a hound of my own.”

“I’ll speak to him,” Maitimo promised. “But for now, may I steal Fingon from you?”

Cautiously, I looked for bitterness on Celegorm’s face, but he only shrugged, expressionless. “I don’t need him.”

“He is grateful, in truth,” Maitimo confided in me, when we were safely away and making for the shining, bustling house again. “But since he is Celegorm, he does not write his thanks in a straight line.”

“And since I am Fingon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, not quite comfortable in speaking of it openly, “You know he does not care for me.”

“Nonsense!” Maitimo threw an arm around my shoulders, jerking me against him so that I nearly lost my footing. “You are _cano_. Everyone cares for you.”

I _did_ lose my footing later that evening, drunk on wine and happiness. I had not half the skill my cousins did—nor a tenth of his.

I was the first to fall.

I know—I knew even then—that no man is immortal. Still, it was hard not to worship him, radiant and unrepentant, mocking us because he had every right to.

Maedhros was the best dancer of us all, and had not fallen. His brothers and I were a heap of flailing limbs, but he did not offer any of us his hand.

I had taken his wine, and his instruction of where to set my feet on the floor, and in all the years of our friendship I had taken every moment of his company that I could capture, for there was no one kinder, no one more attentive, no one who bolstered me more staunchly in my hopes.

 _Let him laugh_ , I thought, scrambling to my feet with ungainly good humour. _If I can give him joy, I will count myself content._

I know him. I am trembling like a leaf, in the moonlight turned cruel, and were I to have a thought in my head I would confess that I no longer know myself.

But I know him, and it is him I came for.

I say his name a second time. He does not move, not even the arm flung high. If I go to him—and I must—there will be no return.

I thought I had accepted that.

I take my first steps. I am like a child again, unsteady, but I speak as I did not when I was small.

Small, and reaching for an eldest cousin.

“Maitimo,” I say. “Maitimo, here I am.”

Then I am close enough to see.

In the mountain-clear, in the stark white light, I can see everything.

The months have aged me. I know that. They lengthened my hair, they roughened my skin. They added to the scars on my hands. The long winter months took fingernails.

He has not aged. Or if he has, I cannot tell, because his face is so utterly changed.

I crouch before the heap of his rag-clad body, with my hands clutched to my breast. I wish this was not Maitimo. I wish I did not know him, and love him, as I do.

I open my mouth. No word leaves it.

 _His_ mouth is ragged, bloody, and set wrong in a jaw that cants crooked and thick with swelling. His delicate cheekbones are lost in swollen flesh, too. Dark blood, black under eerie midnight, is tacky over the bridge of his nose, caked beneath his nostrils, dribbled hideously down his misshapen chin.

His eyes are bruised shut.

My breath is a sob, and I would give much to shut _my_ eyes to this sight. I would give much, but not him.

I force myself back into myself: the doctor back into Fingon, who came here with a little child’s hope for wholeness. I force my gaze to shift, away from his matted hair (which, by being still the right color, pains me also), and I take into account his drooping, twisted shoulders. One hand is cradled in his lap, the palm upturned, the lithe fingers starved thin between thickened knuckles.

The other—

I drag my eyes up, up, until I see how much the blood runs down.

It is encased in metal. In newfound horror, I wonder if it was dipped in molten steel. But no—I shudder, and reassure myself. A burn would not bleed.

Am I comforted, by the sight of his blood? Sick to my bones, I stretch out my own hand and then draw back. I have not even ascertained if he—if he—

I must touch him.

(No return.)

I can remember, in this chilling air, his warmth. His arms around brothers or cousins, mother or friend. I can hear his laugh, somehow, on the wind.

 _You are_ cano _. Everyone cares for you._

First, his pulse.

I slip off my glove. I grind my teeth, and I feel the sting of tears, hot and cold at once. I take that poor, free hand in mine, and I say his name again.

He burns. He lives, then, and I learn it before I can even find the pulse in the bend of his wrist.

His heart is beating very quickly, as if it is afraid. I chafe his hand gently between both of mine. His fingertips are icy, for lack of circulation, though his palm and forearm are hot and dry. His fever has not broken, or if it did, it rose again.

 _You are a doctor, sir_ , I remind myself again. I do not want to admit that my gaze shies from the gory metal. _Have a little fortitude! A pipkin of spirit!_

This I know: he is fastened to the mountain by a cruel device, and he is bleeding from its edges. But he is also ill, with shock or infection, even if I set aside the worry of his wounds. I release his hand reluctantly (how tempting it is to be blind to the world, seeking comfort in a half-dead touch) and shift my pack from my shoulders.

The extra coat, which I had wound through the straps, mocks me.

Did I think we would walk home together, side-by-side?

I rummage for water, and whiskey. I had better start with water—who knows how long he has languished here? He must be parched with thirst.

With my flask in my left hand, I stretch out my right to slip behind his neck. He has his head tipped back against the rock. It does not fall forward because of how his shoulder is unnaturally strained.

The back of his neck is hot, also, but that is not what troubles me. It is—ridged. There are scars there, beneath my questioning touch, and once more I find myself weeping, biting my lips as my eyes and nose flow.

I have no time to see them, those scars. I lift the flask to his broken mouth. I tip it towards him, very slowly, and even so he jolts against me.

 _Alive._ There is a song inside me, and it is at once a dirge and a hymn of rejoicing, as if his movement was a wakening. Something new, for which I had not dared to hope.

I burn; he lives.

He coughs the water out, and as if by old habit, I stroke his hair.

“There now,” I whisper. “It is only a little water, Maitimo.”

His eyes shift beneath the bloated lids. He moves, writhing almost, and lowering his head to draw it away from my hand. I realize, belatedly, that he is cowering.

I never expected to recognize _that_ , in him.

“Water,” he croaks. And then another word, that I can scarcely make out, but which I think is—

“Dog?”

He repeats both words, still moving away from me.

“There are no dogs here,” I say. “Do not worry, Maitimo. I have whiskey, too, but water will quench your thirst. That is more important, at present.”

When I bring the flask to his lips this time, he drinks. I thread my fingers through the tangles of his hair again. I have held the dying, like this.

He is not dying. I will not let him.

“That is enough,” I murmur, taking it away. “We must save some for the journey down.”

 _He can’t walk now._ _He snapped his leg in a prize fight. More or less._

I understand, now, why Gwindor grieved. I—I do not want to understand any further, though soon I may. Pacing my breath as best I can, so that I do not choke on it, I tuck the flask back in my satchel. Then I turn my attention to Maitimo’s legs, bent awkwardly beneath him. They are unbound, but—my hand passes over the more crooked of the two, and I feel wood splinting it, under the rough cloth of his trousers. There is some swelling around the hard lines of the splint; I probe lightly with my fingers. He shudders.

“I am sorry,” I tell him hastily, still in the softest voice I can muster. If the voice is a little watery, a little spent by tears, I trust it will not distress him too severely. “I am only trying to understand—how you fare.”

I squeeze my eyes and my mouth shut, then. I wait until the tremor of my own pain passes. When I open my eyes, and look upon his face again, he is gazing back at me.

“ _Cano_?”

“Yes,” I gasp. “It is your _cano_ , and I am come to take you home.”

The ruined lines of his face go slack. His mouth twists. “Time?”

“It’s time,” I agree, blubbering. “Very good, Maitimo. It is time.”

He shuts his heavy eyes again. 

I am a doctor, and it _is_ time. It is time to see to his other hand. I unfold the borrowed coat, and lay it over his knees.

_Well again, you made me well again—_

The lantern I brought with me shall have to serve. I fumble for it, and discover that my hands are shaking. They mustn’t. I have work to do. Whatever—whatever hurts his right hand has borne, I must be gentle and steady in tending to them.

I am about to uncork the fuel flask, when another of Gwindor’s warnings rings in my ears.

_…it’s a wall of stone, with eyes at every hole._

Light is too much of a risk. I am once more beholden to the generous moon.

 _Please don’t hate him_ , I said, long ago, to my mother who is dead, and my father who is not. I was so desperate, on the shores of that river, to believe that there had been no hurt, even while the raw-edged truth tore my heart from my chest. Here is another hurt I would disbelieve, if I could.

His hand was not gilded by fire-heat. Nonetheless, it was gloved, and in crouching beside him, looking upon it directly with a doctor’s eyes (and, unfortunately, my same heart), I see how it was done.

They slipped my cousin’s hand between two molded plates of copper, and they hammered it through with nails at every joint. I know how the bones of a hand are laid, and I know that bones as well as flesh have been pierced.

I choke. Not on my breath, exactly, but on another sob. If it were colder, as it has been in my sad, recent history, the tears would freeze on my skin.

I have never, never seen such cruelty. Not even when Argon was drowning in his blood—not even when my mother slipped down into darkness—

This is a new world, underpinned by a new hell. This whole mountain is built up with evil, and I can only quail on my knees before it, discerning pain without any notion of its purpose.

In too many ways, I am alone. Gwindor could not come this far, and I do not blame him. I did not ask for any companion, save him—I did not ask Finrod to join me, for I know my father will need him more he needs me, whether he will (in loyalty) admit it or not. I could not pretend that my cause is Turgon’s, or Aredhel’s—nor would I submit them to such danger.

Still: I wish I was not alone.

I want Maitimo to be beside me: a nonsensical wish, in truth. He is _here_ , but not here. He is here, but he cannot comfort me.

His death is the one thing he cannot save _me_ from.

 _But no,_ I remind myself. _I will not let him die._

With my tongue between my teeth, I consider. The contraption appears to be fastened by a ring embedded in it, to another, larger ring sunken in the rock. If I could pry it open, it would cause him immense pain, but—

 _But_. I lean forward, resolved not to be a fool. There is a sharp, foul smell, beyond that of blood and metal. That means infection.

And long ago—

_Look here, Henrik—I am sorry, frightfully sorry…It is a safe procedure, if done correctly—_

(That man died anyway, after I had—after I—)

Therefore, I am given little hope. I am given a choice between death and maybe-death. I know that. By God, I know it.

And I know him.

Another tremor, mine. It passes.

I do not need the lantern as much as I need my knife.

For just the next moment, I wait. I sit back on my heels and look at him, and then I take his good, left hand in mine again.

“Maitimo,” I say. The name does not even sound like a name anymore. It is a word and a pulse. Life itself, that pulse. “I am sorry. You will have to be strong.”

As if—ragged and beaten, fevered and wasted—he has not already been strong.

He opens his eyes at my touch, my voice. His jaw grinds, and it is as if pain hangs over him like a veil. “Fingon,” he mutters. “Good—good Fingon. Do it…do it quickly.”

It must have taken him a great deal of effort, to say those words.

I grip his fingers firmly. “I shall,” I promise. “As quickly as I can.”

_Eyes—_

We have waited too long as it is.

In my satchel I have carbolic acid, which Doctor Olorin taught me to use sparingly. I have laudanum and whiskey both. Chloroform would have greater effect, but it is not without its dangers, especially for one in such a condition as he is. I have a clean strip of leather, to fit between his teeth, and I have enough bandages to—

It comes over me, quite suddenly. The full knowledge of what I must do.

I have loved my cousin’s hands all my life. They are beautiful. Clever. Deadly.

His hands taught me violence. How to deliver a sound blow. How to handle a fencing foil. How to fire a gun.

I was never very skilled at any of these things, but now I am to do violence to _him_. I am to sever himself from himself, a punishment worse than any I dreamed of devising in my darkest days of judgment and reproach.

I take out the long knife.

My teeth have begun to chatter. Not, I think, with the cold. I clench them together, and administer a modest dose of the laudanum, little more than a drop between his lips. When that is done, I wash my hands in water and medicinal whiskey. If I am efficient, the whole process should take no more than ten minutes.

A bone-saw would be better than a knife. I must make do with what I can.

I press the leather between Maitimo’s teeth. He did not rouse for the laudanum on his tongue, but this, he spits out. I try again, and he spits it out again. I despair of this: _only_ of this. I will allow myself to despair of nothing else.

I use whiskey, too, to clean away the blood and filth that streak his wrist. He cries out, and I say, with no success at being humorous,

“That is why I have something for you to bite down upon!”

After, I wash my hands again, and disinfect the blade as Olorin taught me.

The only thing left to do is to put it to his flesh.

The glove ends at the base of his palm. This is, at present, an advantage. I can disarticulate the wrist without having to sever the radius. During my time with Olorin, I first pieced together skeletons, tying colored ribbons between the bones in place of ligaments. Later, I worked on corpses with an herb-soaked rag wrapped over my mouth and nose. And later still, with no such protection, I performed real surgery.

Who has done this to my cousin, and why, and how they came to delight in such vicious treatment of another man—I cannot know, and I cannot mind these questions now. A doctor cannot ask _why_.

I brace my hand against his tortured shoulder. He does not stir.

I slide the blade in beneath the lowest joint of his thumb.

No doubt, because of the angle at which the device has pinned him, there is some numbing at this point of entry. Accordingly, I am not surprised (oh, though I _am_ wretched) when he does not immediately convulse, or cry out.

When the knife reaches the first ligament, however, it is a different matter.

It is just as well that I jerk it back reflexively, for when one employs a tool that is also a weapon, harm is ever a hairsbreadth away.

“No!” he cries, and his eyes are wider than I thought possible, what with the bruising around them. Animal-wide, and sorely blood-veined, but still _his_ in fierceness and light.“No—please— _please_ —”

I would do anything for him.

This has never ceased to be true. Even when I was angry, and thought I would find him inexorable, arrogant— _unchanged_ —

In my heart I could not deny the brother-bond between us.

“Maitimo,” I say carefully, and then, because it does not seem fair to call him by a tender name when I have his blood hot on my hands, “Maedhros— _this is the only way_.”

He cries out again, wordlessly, but it is loud enough that I fear he may wake whatever demons live inside the hard-eyed, watchful stone that is ringed about us. My teeth have ceased to chatter, and I am coldhearted with the knowledge of risk, the weight of duty. I force myself against him; my left hand over his mouth, my elbow against the crook of his arm, where it is dragged upwards, to arrest his movement where I can.

I hold the knife steady. I fit the blood-bathed edge back into the cleft I have made in his wrist, and I press onward. Where there are spaces in the bone, the separation _is_ clean; where there is bone, I must grind through it, with all my might. I endeavor to carve around the capitate as much as possible, rather than through it. Precision is difficult to achieve in darkness. Difficult to achieve, in the midst of a struggle.

Maitimo struggles, but he is not strong enough.

(Oh, how he struggles.)

His teeth gnash at my hand. His shoulders strain and lurch. I do not release him. I cannot.

I am half through. The blood flows thickly over the handle of the knife and my fingers. Blood loss _is_ the chief danger, and I let this necessary fear guide me through the snap of tendons and the deep groaning of his bones.

The second fear, of course, is that we shall be heard.

In the end, I do not know how many minutes it takes, to sever this hand I loved. The mockery, of course, is that I have his pocket-watch pinned under my coat.

The mockery is that this is how we _live_.

When he faints, it is a mercy. He slumps forward, freed at a price I forced him to pay.

I will bear the weight of this.

I take him in my bloody arms, and I bear the weight of him.

_When I was your age_ , he said—this Maedhros of my worshipful memory— _My hands bled terribly from chopping wood. It’s a nasty feeling_.

 _Hadn’t you gloves?_ I asked, and he answered,

_I gave them to Celegorm._

It does not matter, which brother it was. It never matters, because he was the best of all of us. Afterwards, he would kill men in cold blood, and yet I did not doubt that his brothers followed him, grieving _because_ he grieved; mourning most for any blemish on that bright soul.

I did not doubt that, had I been with them, I would have done the same.

Such was his power.

Such was the power, of this body in my arms.

I have used one of the gloves I brought for him after all, but the use is perverted by circumstance. When I bound the bleeding stump as tightly as I can, I fitted the glove around it, and tied it off with deerskin lace, which is both pliant and strong. The wound needs to be cauterized, but I cannot build a fire here.

Maedhros has not woken. There is no one to mourn him, for I am not yet permitted to succumb to grief. I am grateful, in one way, to have him lost to the world. It will prevent him from agitating himself further. It will prevent a struggle.

Still, it means I must carry him.

I repack my satchel. My bloody hands are shaking.

Then I remember the black mouth at the foot of the mountain. It feels like safety, now. It is a forge, Gwindor said, and though it was destroyed, there may be kindling to burn.

There will, at least, be shelter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not a doctor. I've done my best. Don't try this at home.
> 
> The switch to first person is something I planned from the beginning. I hope it works for you. You may recall that the last (chronological) time at which we heard Fingon in first person POV was the flashback that starts the chapter--the goodbye he didn't know would be a last goodbye of sorts. To my mind, seeing Mae again wakes up some part of his soul that lay sleeping; some part of his voice.
> 
> Thank you so much for all the reviews. Please keep them coming!


	7. he sought not his own, neither power nor glory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The world has changed so much in the past few weeks--even since the last chapter was posted. I hope you're all staying safe and well, and that this fic (and other fics, which I promise are forthcoming) can serve as a little distraction.

When they were small, my Feanorian cousins wore their hair in curls. Long candle curls, for Maglor, who had fine dark hair like a doll’s, and unruly yellow ringlets for Celegorm. No curls at all for Caranthir, whose hair was like a horse’s, nor really for Curufin, who wanted his hair short from a young age, but the twins took up the tradition again. Our hair was always kept neatly trimmed, mine and Turgon’s and Argon’s, and so their baby-locks were something of a novelty, to us.

The trouble is that I can never quite be sure if I remember Maedhros with _his_ curls, before they were cut off to mark a proper entrance to boyhood.

I had to learn not to overplay my hand, in the season of four cousins, newly (half) grown. I was the youngest, and if I tried to pretend that I knew _anything_ , I was teased and chided by the others.

By Maglor, mostly.

Still, there was a hazy moment from the past that I preserved as if in amber. I kept it secret for a long while, this baby-certainty of mine. Then, I let it slip one day and fell prey to Maglor yet again.

“You were an _infant_ , Fingon,” he drawled. “You weren’t even _talking_.”

“But how else would I know that we were playing in Grandfather’s parlor, that first time?” I demanded, stung, though I knew it was too late.

 _You’ve gone and done it, Fingon_ , I said to myself. _Spilling like a turned-out purse!_

“Because Maitimo must have _told_ you. He’s been on that silly nickname for years, you know. The subject _has_ come up.”

“Oh, so it’s silly now, is it?” I demanded. “Shall I tell him that you don’t wish to be called a _cano_ anymore, then?”

Two little white dents appeared (to my eyes) on either side of Maglor’s bone-thin nose. “Not unless you want me to tear your thick throat out,” he hissed. “With my wolf-teeth.”

“My throat isn’t _thick_!” (Do you see, how we were children?)

“Thick? I should say not. You’re swallowed up by that collar,” said Maedhros, returning with platter of petit-fours. “Macalaure, my love, why is Fingon afraid for his throat?”

“Haven’t the faintest,” Maglor lied, taking one of the little cakes. “Fingon, why are you afraid for your throat?”

I ignored him. I watched, instead, how the sunlight of a Saturday afternoon slipped in through the windowpanes and settled on Maedhros’ hair. He had grown it long, about his collar, and it was curling again.

I was sure I remembered. Sure I had seen a boy—tall, then, to me, though much smaller than my father—with shining red ringlets and an offered hand. I saw him in my fond mind’s eye, stooping down, and calling for _cano_.

Calling for me.

I am on my hands and knees, and it nearly breaks me. He isn’t as heavy as he should be—Lord, I’d be a sorrier fool than I already am if I thought any different—but his body lies limp, and it is so much trouble to shift it onto mine.

Also, I am weeping again.

What if they find us here, and kill us? What if they do it as cruelly as they chained and pierced him, and I have only brought him _more_ pain?

I shudder. Sweat rolls hot and foul beneath my coat, and dissipates coolly on my clammy forehead. It is that dreadful, nightly hour, long after the fall of darkness, but still very far from dawn.

How am I to save him, if I cannot so much as lift him to my shoulders?

How am I to keep pace on the shifting stones, when my breast labors in lament?

_The wound needs to be cauterized_. My pulse roars in my throat and ears, but I repeat the necessary precautions over and over, mouthing words that no one else can hear. Through the blur and the dark, warring in my eyes, Maedhros is horribly pale beneath the blood and bruising. I have not seen him with his eyes shut and his features slack and senseless in a long, long time.

Sleep always used to look like a blessing, on him. To see him lost to the world was to realize that he met each waking moment with pointed and particular effort, invisible by day because of his charm and vivacity.

When I first realized that, I swore I should admit it to no one.

Not even, completely, to myself.

I drench my hands in alcohol and do the same to some of the bandages in my pack. Blood pumps steadily from the terminus of his wrist, obscuring the white of bone. I work quickly. He does not fight me anymore. One-handed Maedhros, my cousin and friend, would die quite quietly in my arms—

—If I let him.

I thought I had managed something, at least, by staunching the bleeding and keeping the wound (worse than a wound) clean. This done, I strapped my pack to my chest, for I would need the full expanse of my back for him. And then I tried to lift him. I felt his body to be too light—too thin.

Still, it was not enough.

I am on my hands and knees now, weeping, for his stupor makes him dead and boneless. I am failing and falling. A handful of his bones, now, belong to me.

_Fingon…_

Who calls my name? What would Uncle Feanor say, were he to rise from the dead and learn that it was I who broke Maitimo in two pieces?

What would my own father say?

 _He_ promised me once that he would never again ask me for salvation.

The third attempt is a successful one. I hoist his wounded arm and his unsplinted leg over my shoulders, and I am able to stand.

 _It was easier to cut off his hand_ , I think, with awful humour, and to punish myself I bite my tongue sharp enough to feel a warm rush of blood.

His head hangs against _his_ shoulder. He smells foul, in all the ways that a tormented, wasted man is made foul. He smells also of the dry stony earth, and of bright, copper blood.

I stagger. That is my first step. _Our_ first step. We are making the return journey together, after all. Oh, am I not proud? I have found my cousin, and like the Christ, I carry him! Here I am, with the lost sheep! Ought I not have slaughtered it?

Two steps, then three, and I manage a few more, my chest rattling with breaths that are bent viciously to laughter.

I am gone as mad as poor Maglor, who left our Maitimo here to die. I am as hopeless as the snow closing over my mother’s body.

A bitter irony: it is snowing here, too.

And yet: I take another step. I take another step, before I stumble to my knees.

It goes on like that. An endless rope of thoughts, hand over hand, none of them gentle or firm or strong, and then a fraying failure of my body. It is not only the savage slope that separates me from that boy amid evergreens, bidding Gwindor farewell. How many ghosts of my own courage did I leave, with the naked trees, and those buried stakes, and the most of all, with my knife between my cousin’s bones?

How much of my spirit is left?

 _Fingon_ , I scold myself. _You are being very foolish. Sniveling over yourself won’t help_ him. _Being romantic about the dreadful forest won’t help_ him.

I have always hated having to let go. I jealously guarded my rights as eldest, in my family—with little thought of the responsibilities attending the same position. Turgon and Aredhel, much less little Argon, could not steal toys from _me_. I had greater strength, greater cunning, and better hiding places.

This is the lesson, then, for my lonely self: I am selfish. I hoard things closely.

What am I to do now?

At the lip of the twisting path, I lower both myself and Maedhros to the rocky earth. He has not woken. He is—he is not _cold_ exactly, but perhaps that is only because _I_ am perspiring madly.

I shake with the exertion, as I lay his body down.

 _Dead_ , I think, unwillingly. Once acknowledged, the word rings over and over again in my ears. _Dead, dead, you only brought him here to hurt him—only cut off his hand to shame him—_

I take his left hand in both of my own, chafing, feeling for a pulse. Someone, some stranger, has hurt my cousin so cruelly that he did not even know me.

I never imagined a Maedhros who would not know me.

“There now,” I whisper, to what may well be his corpse. “There now, all shall be well. We have come so far already—farther than any believed we could. Mae—” I do not know what to call him— _Maitimo_ seems forfeit, given what I have done, what I have asked of him. _Maedhros_ is…too many things. “As I climbed up to find you, tonight, the moon was very bright,” I say, not calling him anything at all. I release his hand, so that I can hold my fingers against his lips, feeling for warmth. “I thought of it as—as a sign. That I was meant to bring you home.”

There is a little pulse. There is a little breath. My throat is still thick with my sobs, but I swallow and prevail.

He lives, yet. I did not kill him, or maim him after he was already all but dead.

 _Fingon_ , I tell myself, in my own voice. _You must let go._

_Not him._

I untangle the straps of my satchel. The snow-flecked air is cold against my shirtfront, where the loaded pack served as an added layer of warmth. I do not wait, however, even to button my coat. I must act swiftly if this is to do any good.

The extra coat, I bound around him as best I could. He needs it. But my bottles and tools, the notes I have carried all this way, frilled like lichen by water and weather—

These, I leave behind. Nothing but the medicinal whiskey, a book of matches, scant rations, and my knife are worth having on hand.

My gun is at my hip.

When we burned our belongings for warmth, I saved Maglor’s fiddle. Turgon would remember that better, no doubt, than he recalled childhood slights.

It was, in a way, the last betrayal before this one.

I cannot care, now, whether Turgon mistrusts me. I cast my own treasures aside, to save the one whom I have always thought to be my brother, too, though I know full well he Is not.

“There now,” I say again. Rote, repetitive. I might as well sing lullabies, to pass the time. “We are on our way.”

And when I have lifted him, struggling still but with renewed vigour and my tears drying on my cheeks, I think again:

_I might as well sing._

_Tell me the tales that to me were so dear,_

_Long, long ago, long, long ago:_

_Sing me the songs I delighted to hear,_

_Long, long ago long ago:_

_Now you are gone my grief is remov’d,_

_Let me forget that so long you have rov’d,_

_Let me believe that you love as you lov’d,_

_Long, long ago, long ago._

The forge at the foot of the mountain belches out the stench of rotting flesh.

My voice has run dry. My memory fails me, too; I’ve sung every childhood ditty I knew. None have stirred him. Twice I had to stop again, to set my fears at rest.

He lived each time.

“We are here,” I whisper, hoarsely. If the mountain has eyes, it must also have ears, but so far no one has assaulted us.

It is not yet dawn. By my dizzy count (I would die myself, I think, were I to hold that pocket-watch in my hand) I believe we have another hour or two until we so much as see a hint of sun. My hands and face are cold, and the snow is coming thicker.

Why, then, can I even smell the forge?

A battle was fought there, said Gwindor—or something like. I know what I will find, but I don’t want to see it. Fingon the blind, I might be called. Doctor Fingon, shutting his eyes to the plight of the world he helped to make.

I may be not yet twenty-two, but I know that every man and woman builds the world they live in. With their promises, their prayers, their ignorance.

We are all here because of ourselves.

And I must bring my knife to red heat, and sear my cousin’s flesh until it no longer bleeds.

I must do this among corpses.

_Do you remember the path where we met,_

_Long long ago, long long ago._

_Ah yes you told me you ne’er would forget,_

_Long long ago, long ago._

I am breathing heavily, and trembling, and it is by a grace not my own that I step where I do, avoiding the gaping belly of a dead man by mere inches. I force my eyes to widen; to take in all that I can.

The moon peers down from the clouds again—a gift.

Snow has settled lightly on these once-men, but it cannot hide them. Nor can the darkness, wholly, when the moon has pierced it and the clouds have failed. The smell of burning, the smell of flesh and offal, sours my breath. It was not _so_ cold, a day or two ago, and the sun will have beaten upon split skin and mealy innards. Even a winter sun.

There are three bodies, stretched like soft leeches, between me (us) and the mouth of the cavern. _I_ am conscious of the body on my shoulders, and so I do not look too closely at them; at the dark blood. Here, the shape of a gun under snow. There, a slash of pale hair covering a face that must not be much like a face anymore.

I keep silent. My song gone; my words of comfort gone.

I am so dreadfully afraid that he is dead again.

It is time to light the lantern, or it will be. I cannot do anything with my hands while I am holding him.

(I took a hand from him.)

There is rubble heaped inside the hollow mouth, and the sharp tang of spent gunpowder, and more bodies.

The world outside is light, compared to this. The world outside is very lonely.

I stamp with my boots, to clear my way. I do not want to rest him against unforgiving rock—or a corpse.

(This is winter. This is the site of a massacre. This is—

My life, told backwards, because I feel as if I have been born tonight.)

When they were small, my Feanorian cousins wore their hair in curls. There is no curl left in Maedhros’ hair. It is matted with blood and filth, damp at his brow and at the nape of his neck. My fingers are not able to be as gentle as I wish to make them.

There is so much more of him—so much more of him, _bleeding_ —than I can bear to think of, so when I lay him at last on the earthen floor of what was once a forge…

… _A smithy_ , Uncle Feanor chides in my mind, but I find I do not want to heed him for anything, any longer.

So much lost, and so much hanging from a thread. Threads are fearfully necessary, in old stories. Old songs.

But I, simple Doctor Fingon, cannot think of fate, nor of dark labyrinths. Not here.

(There _is_ no monster here. I will not let us build one, between us. I will not let us make one of ourselves.)

I have my hand at his (scarred) neck, then, and I think on his hair as I first knew it, and as I know it now, because _that_ is the thread that begs no further explanation at present. It is merely something to keep me sane.

When I have steadied myself, by carding the tangles through my fingers, and speaking a few of my mother’s old words, I shrug off my lightened pack awkwardly. I use it to cushion his head until I can fashion a better pillow with my own coat.

This leaves me shivering, I confess, but I know I must not mind it. He needs everything more than I do. He is losing blood.

And I have been colder than this, and I lived.

With my satchel returned to me, I rummage. I search, sightless, for my little lantern of tin and glass, and I have just found the flask that accompanies it when I hear him speak.

“ _You_.”

The lantern is nearly lost against the hard ground, so harshly do I start at the sound of his voice. I set it down shakily. I am on my hands and knees, beside him, but it is better now. I am not weeping. And he—he—

“Maitimo,” I say. I thought I wouldn’t call him that any longer, but maybe I have done nothing, during these endless hours, but tell lies to myself. “Maitimo, don’t strain yourself. Don’t—”

“You,” he mutters again. He has always enunciated clearly; musically. He speaks intelligibly still, though there is no music in it. No music, behind that crooked jaw, that punished face. “It—really—” the syllables whistle a little, through his cracked lips, “ _Really you_.”

My hands find him again. Not to lift; not to force. Only to rest lightly at his breast and shoulder, to let him know how close I truly am.

“It is really me,” I agree. “Fingon. _Cano_. You need not doubt it any longer, if—if you did.”

I can scarcely see him, of course, in this renewed darkness. To unfriendlier though sharper eyes. he would be just another body. Such eyes would not see the wide-eyed boy with the outstretched hand—with _two_ outstretched hands, if he so desired—nor the gleaming, ruddy curls.

They would not see my cousin, but I do.

I tell myself that he knows me now, and I knew him always, and that is all that shall ever matter to us, when the pain is past.

(Oh, shall this pain ever pass us by?)

“Still—still hurts.” He coughs, and wheezes a low whine, cut off halfway, that speaks to a fear I have harboured: broken ribs. “ _C_ - _cano_. Why—why does it—”

_I must bring my knife to red heat._

“Steady on,” I say, a little louder, my voice echoing strangely before the shapeless altars of subterranean pitch. “This will all be over soon.”

Then I reach for my lantern, and my fuel. I fill the bowl very carefully, checking the flow from the flask’s mouth with my fingertip.

And finally, because I must have light before I can stoke true flames, I strike a match.

It bursts, it flares, a welcome bubble of gold, but only for an instant.

I do not even count that instant.

For—I am too consumed by that which would, by firelight, seem to consume _me_. A mouth and eyes.

Teeth, that is. Grinning. And eyes as tawny as a cat’s.

All arranged within a face that looms a hand’s breadth from my own.

I am not proud of myself for what follows, but nor am I ashamed. Pride does not enter in.

I drop the match and flame. Of course I do, given such a start! But the lantern, at least, rolls away unbroken, and so the fire falters. It is my body, trained better than my mind, perhaps, that surprises me.

It is as if my body knows with great certainty that this mouth and these eyes shall strike at any moment. It is as if my body does not forget its only task.

I am all that stands—kneels—between eyes, mouth, and Maitimo.

As the lantern rolled, so do I. I roll back, so that my legs may be unencumbered, and the rush of air and hot breath together tell me how right were my muscles and tendons. He leaps, this man-that-is-all-face, and I with my shoulders and elbows against this pitiless, packed earth, have my legs out from beneath me just in time.

I kick as a donkey kicks.

See? Pride does not enter in.

 _He_ —whoever he is—is satisfyingly flummoxed, a few paces away. I hear him groan, and it is a moment before he collects himself and his limbs. I have winded him. In that moment, I am on my feet, with my gun in my hand. There is a little light (or a little less darkness) filtering in the entrance of the cavern, but it is to my left. Maitimo is to my right. And straight ahead, in darkness—

“I am armed, sir!” I cry. I do not think this man—whoever he is—deserves the politesse of a _sir_ , but I must do what I can. If this is to be a fight, and I think it is, given that I have already applied boot to belly—

It must be a fight on my terms.

I listen to his labored breathing. And I listen for Maitimo’s breathing—since he is still conscious, and is panting thinly and wretchedly—and I feel my own.

“Do not shoot.” His voice is thin and high. Plaintive. Not at all what I expected.

I do not answer him. I keep my piece steady.

“If you fire upon rock walls,” he says, and now his words are softened almost to a lilt, which unsettles me further, “The bullet will fly back to you, _mon chère_.”

Maitimo gasps, as if he has been strangled.

And then there are two sounds: flint striking, which is a sound that I, born of winter, would know anywhere…and a queer, gobbling laugh.

He is right. Whoever he is, he is right. I cannot risk a deadly ricochet in the dark. Not with Maitimo half-gone from loss of blood and grievous hurt already.

I listen for the sound of breathing. For the sound of another snap of flint against steel.

Sparks fly. Not enough.

A hand brushes my ankle. I recoil, before I remember that it is Maitimo’s hand. Before I remember that I left him one. I cannot see him, but I hear him whisper,

“ _Run._ ”

“There he is,” says our monster, illuminated suddenly by a lantern larger than my own. “Poor Maitimo. But he has his _Fingon_ at long last.”

I am stubborn. I look upon his red-lit face and his dark eye-hollows, and I grind my teeth even though I do not know what to do with my gun, with Maitimo at my feet. I look upon his pale hair—

I think of the pale-haired corpse at the door of this hellmouth, and wonder if it really was a corpse after all. He came from somewhere, after all. Why not from among dead things?

“Who are you?”

He is taller than me, I think. I cannot tell if he is broader at the shoulders, for he is shrouded in a sort of pelisse of fur, both of black and of lighter colour.

“ _You_ are Fingon.” He rolls his neck; his pointed jaw. “Well, Fingon. Put down your gun. We can be gentlemen, can we not? We are not so low as poor Maitimo.”

I must do something with my hands. Yes, my hands: I have two of them. The gun is too great a danger. I have the matches in my pocket, but my knife is in my satchel. And that is at my feet.

If I so much as look at Maitimo, I know we shall be finished.

 _He_ is waiting for me to look at Maitimo.

“ _Run_ ,” rasps my cousin again, tearing at my heartstrings and my courage.

They know each other. I do not know _how_.

 _Don’t be a fool, Fingon._ That is Olorin’s voice, but when it next speaks, it shifts into my father’s. _See what is before you._

“You are Mairon,” I say, and suddenly, I am so very, very angry that I wish I could kick him again, or beat him with my fists until he or my fists break. “But I know very little of you; only that you have done great ill to my friend here.”

 _And I shall avenge it._ But Mairon does not need to hear that. My boots told him that, if he cared to heed them.

“Great ill?” A laugh again, but not the same one. “Ah”—and now his voice changes altogether—“Ah, _cano_ , you know not the half of it.”

I stand frozen. Not ready, but stiff and sick with recognition.

That is—that is _Maitimo’s_ voice.

To hear this monster call me _cano_ —

He has not moved, his lantern in hand, and I follow its rays of light with my eyes. There are bodies here, yes, to watch us with glazed and lifeless eyes. There are broken benches. Scraps of warped metal.

There is wood.

_Fire. I need fire._

Better than a knife, I find I want a hot poker.

The tortured breathing that wends its way out of my cousin’s breast drags on. I hold the gun steady. I think of the flask of fuel on the ground. I stoppered it, before I lit the fated match.

“Oh, but this is precious,” Mairon says. He grins again. He lifts the lantern with one white hand and moves it in a slow arc. “Tell me what you _do_ know.”

If I keep him talking, I buy us time. “I know that you are chattel of Bauglir’s,” I say. I wonder if Bauglir is here, too, but I cannot imagine him…in a place such as this. I cannot imagine him, yet, outside that vaulted exhibition hall in Washington Square.

I own that that is what haunts me most.

“Chattel?” He is taken aback, or wishes to appear so. “Is that what rumours have reached outside our mountain? How strange. For the branded one lies _there_.”

The image of a hot poker, clenched in my hand, turns my stomach now. “Is that why you waited for us, in—in a smithy?”

He is still smiling. At least, I think he means to. “Is that not why you brought him here? To seal the empty wrist? I know that you hewed away his hand.”

I hate to hear my mother’s softened accent twisted, as much as I hate to hear my cousin’s fair voice—robbed.

_No, Fingon. See what is before you._

“Was it you?” I demand. “Who locked him in that device?”

“Ah! You admire my work.”

“I do not know _you_ ,” I answer, as coldly as I can. He has begun to pace, more restless in his demeanor than the cougar was, and I, though tightly strung as one of Beren’s hunting bows, lower myself a little to the earth. I try to seem as if I seek to be nearer to my trembling cousin, for I think this creature expects that of me. “I do not know you, _Mairon_ , and I never shall.”

With my left hand, I feel for the flask.

He struck first light. He has shown me where he stands, while I am still in shadow. I have no gratitude, just as I have no pride.

I only have what we all have.

Time, and what I make of it.

(My hand closes around the flask.)

“He will beg,” Mairon tells me, softly. Just as I expected, his eye is on my cousin. “If you command him to. Each night he has begged me, straining his leash. _Water for the dog_ , he says. Or at least, he tries to. And it is effort, Master Fingon, that we honour. It is effort, _sir_.”

I straighten abruptly, as if I am offended above all else. Flask and matches, now, are in my left hand. “Could a dog bring down a mountain?” I demand. “For I understand _he_ did.”

Mairon purses his lips, and passes the lantern from one hand to the other. The light dances drunkenly on the distant walls. “ _Sacre bleu._ You have spoken to the grey one. The grey one weeps for him, I know. _He_ knew that I would not let the dog run free again. Not without cropping its tail.”

“ _You_ would not, or Bauglir?”

“Do not speak his name, _cano_. He is more than you or that cowering bitch. More than any of us.”

“Spoken as only a cowering bitch _would_ ,” I say, and I take the greatest risk of all: I holster my gun. I clench my right fist, without meaning to use it. (Yet.)

“Ha, ha!” he cries, throwing his head back, and the way the light reflects—

Shows me red amid the black and tawny furs.

Not red so much as _copper_.

Hunters take trophies.

Those are not tufts of fur, about his throat. They are locks of hair—

“Fingon,” Maitimo sobs, and I wish I could hold his grasping hand in mine, and beg him for forgiveness, and I wish I could have saved him from this future, when we were both young and fool enough to believe it possible—

(I can see the small boy with the soft, bright hair, and I am struggling in the depths of my heart to understand how he could ever have been intended for violence.)

Here is one future: my eyes have adjusted to the glow of lantern light. There is a broken basket of kindling to my left. Towards the entrance, and away from Maitimo.

Mairon murmurs, “You hear him? You hear him beg?”

I swallow bile. I answer, with my heart beating quicker and quicker, “I do. But it shall not save him.”

A curious stillness falls on the hellion hunter. I think I see the glitter of his gaze; I think I feel the malice of his thoughts.

He wants to kill us, but he wants something else first.

I swore I wouldn’t know him.

“He used to scream your name,” Mairon muses. “ _Fingon, Fingon, please._ As tenderly as he called for his mother, and more truthfully. Now, is that an _amour fou?_ I doubt. I doubt very much that you think him _pitiful_ , as I do.”

I put my hands behind my back. The matches in the palm of my right; fingers of my left drawing out the flask stopper. I step, I swagger. _Nearer._

I do not listen for heaving breaths and mumbled pleas. I cannot—let myself—

(I am just beside the kindling, now.)

“So you have us trapped, sir. That is your way of thinking. You couldn’t hold him by force, so you’ll take him by cunning?”

“I’ll take you both.” Mairon is not laughing anymore. He sets the lantern down on the edge of an overturned bench. He props one boot on the edge of the bench as well, and rummages at his belt.

Now there is a knife in his hand.

_Maitimo,_ I think, somewhere deep and distant, the current of a dark river, _Or Maedhros, or Russandol, if that is what I must call you now—I have so much to tell you. It has been so long, so long. Is not that all? All that lies between us? You promised, and I trusted you, and the bridge burned. I have so much to tell you, of the river and the winter and the anger in my heart. I thought I might strike you, when we met again. But never would I leave you. No, not even now._

“So we are _not_ to be gentlemen?” I demand, as, with my left hand, I pour the fuel over the kindling that is now at my back. “You draw a weapon, though I have put down my gun?”

He does not answer me, this cat-eyed man with my cousin’s red curls at his throat. He whistles.

Silence, below. I am left to wonder again, if Maedhros lives. Left to wonder, for I cannot tend to him.

I cannot tend to him, if he is (maybe) to survive.

 _But if he is already dead_ —

No. I quiet my ghost. “Mairon,” I say again. “I shall take him from here, you may depend upon it. The only thing _you_ have to lose is your life.” Then stepping back and to my right, I thrust my hands before me.

The matches—a whole bundle—are lit with a desperate scratch. I drop them into the open basket.

For a horrible second, during which _his_ lantern prevails, I fear that my careful efforts— _effort! It is effort that we honour—_ have been in vain. But then there is a glad huff of air hungrily consumed, and the fire crackles greedily. The cavern rises around us, marked by long cathedral shadows and shivering swathes of light.

It is somehow crueler, like this.

I take up my gun again. I do not mean to use it, but he does not know _me_ , and so he will not know _that_. “I’ll risk the shot,” I say, in a tone that I hope is as cold as Nebraska’s blizzards, “With better light.”

For a reply, he hurls the lantern at me.

I duck—it shatters somewhere in the hollow dark. It could be anywhere. _He_ could be anywhere, and all of a terrible sudden he is, sprinting across the floor between us to drive his knife into Maitimo’s throat.

But I am quick enough. _Just_ quick enough, and perhaps this time my body was the fool, for I realize as I am struggling beneath him, beneath the slashing blade and his snapping, laughing teeth, that he does not intend to kill Maedhros _here_.

Maybe he does not even intend to kill me.

I lost my gun, this time. As such, I take my chances with his teeth. My skull is thick. I ram my head upwards, my left hand locked around the wrist of his knife-hand.

“You are a coward,” I say, scrambling out of reach while he reels from my blow. “He had children with him, and still you are stalking like a cat, now that he has escaped you again!”

“You _amused_ me,” he spits. We are on our feet again, facing each other. Not circling—I will not give him the chance to draw near to Maitimo again, whether he will kill him or not.

(Maedhros, Maitimo. The names are mingling. Currents in the dark river, blood in the water.)

“Amused you?”

“Comforting him. Singing your childish songs. He must have known you would come for him, in the end. What a pity you waited until we had carved him to ribbons and painted him _sanguinet_.” Mairon flexes his fingers around the hilt of the blade. I am forcing the howl to stay behind my teeth. I cannot quite force the tears to stay in my eyes.

He says,

“I heard the screams fly out of him, when you—” and he lunges, with the knife, but I roll down and forward, head hard against his chest, so that the blade only stings shallowly across my shoulders. In this manner, too, I have thrown him head-over-heels.

The flaming wood of my making is flung around us.

Some of it is only smoldering, but it will do. If I can get my hands on a length of it, it will make me a dependable weapon—almost as good as the knife in my sorry satchel.

Cats are afraid of fire, after all.

Mairon spreads his hands, the knife hooked under one long, pale thumb. I can see the copper, still glinting, and I know he must _want_ me to see it. If I imagine that knife in my cousin’s hair…and worse, much worse, in his flesh—

“Now, now, _cano_ ,” he purrs. “I see the rage. And rage is like the fear, yes? It shakes and shakes, until you cannot fight any longer.”

I say nothing.

He grins, and turns the knife with his curling fingers, so that it points downward. Ready, and the light running down it runs red. “Now that I think of it, you are Fingon, but he pleads with _cano._ What is this—this _cano_? This name we call you by?”

There is a scrap the length of my forearm a few inches from my boot. Its head glows ember-bright.

I am not afraid of any man. And he _is_ a man, though he is trying to choose otherwise. I bare my teeth, and I tell him. “It means the child of a wolf.”

_Russandol, I name you so, for you lived and endured and hoped as Russandol. Breathe a little longer. Trust a little longer. You broke my trust, but I hold yours beside my heart, and my heart still beats. You did not break it. I did not let you._

He has his left hand around my throat, and his right drags the knife along the shell of my ear. I feel blood trickling. My body lurches against the sting of pain. I allow it.

His knee drives hard against my chest. I allow it.

He does not pin my hands. I take that length of kindling, with its patient burning—I take that crude weapon, and I pray to be gifted in this one act of violence—

I twist my head away from the biting edge, and blindly trusting, I stab upwards.

His scream is enough.

I made for the throat. Dazed, free of the weight and threat of him, I realize I have missed, but not badly. I watch him hobble backwards, crab-legged and distorted by the restive flame-light, with his hands over his eyes—

Still screaming.

It is the strangest sound I have heard all this dreadful day, made stranger, maybe, by the fact that I feel neither grief nor fear. I am winded, and Maitimo may be dead.

I am lost, just for that instant.

And in that instant, Mairon is gone.

He has run out into the night, and his keening follows him until it fades.

Back to earth. _Come back, Fingon. You have work left before you._

That is my own voice.

I am winded, bruised, bleeding. Not seriously hurt. There is not a scrape or scratch on me that deserves attention before my cousin does.

“Maitimo,” I whisper, gathering him up in my weary arms. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

His eyes are closed. He shudders as if battered by the winds of a storm.

The fire, my only fire, is going out. All this, and I have not saved him yet.

I am beginning to wonder if I can.


	8. and staying Fingon's hand he took him up

I choked back bile myself, when my cousin retched a second time.

He smelled of sick and piss and perspiration. He was too thin to have been eating much; I could feel his ribs beneath his dirty satin waistcoat. All my foolish soups and stews, my lumpish attempts at bread, had been for naught. This was how he had been spending his time, when I was busy with my studies of _health_. An illness that I never dreamed would rule him had consumed him as profoundly as the fiercest fever. Cut to the quick of my spirit, I drew his damp hair away from his sweating forehead. My voice—I knew it trembled, shamefully and like a child’s, as I said, “Just a little farther now. We are nearly—”

But it was more than my voice. I was painfully aware, in that moment: my hands were not my own. I wanted to bury my face in them, so as to hide my baby tears, but I could not. Instead, I had to haul him upright, making us both crooked and ungainly because of his greater height. I had to guide him, fending off pangs of cousinly shock by steeling myself with a doctor’s keen resolve. We passed through streets we both had known.

I did not think he knew them now.

It was a fitting punishment, for me. All my life—at least, all the life I’d known him in friendship, which was the life I counted most anyway—I had cultivated a secret wish to be his better. Not in _essence_. Certainly not in _nobility_. But oh! for one moment in which Maitimo might _need_ me. In which little Fingon could offer him a sturdy arm (perhaps he was wounded, in this imagined moment. Not grievously, but enough to be winded), and hear him thank me. He _would_ thank me, and then be strong again.

Strong enough for both of us.

Instead, he choked and spat and coughed, and then he begged.

I heard him beg, and I never lost the dread memory of it—though I did not know _that_ until years later.

 _Promise me you’ll forget me—this. You’ll forget this._ _Please._

I promised, and broke the promise all at once. I promised until we reached Valinor Park, where, under lamplight that seemed to glare in a most unfriendly fashion, I rang the bell until it sounded like a cry of citywide alarm. Maglor dashed down the front steps, at last, to take him from me, to pretend I was not worthy to see them— _him_ —like this.

 _He was going to marry her, Maglor_ , I said later, across the figure in the bed who was the living reason for our ghost of a truce. I had fought my way in, while Maglor’s own clannishness waned with exhaustion, after Maitimo collapsed at his feet and would go no farther without both of us dragging him.

Maglor looked up from biting his nails. _Who?_ He was very pale.

_Didn’t you know her? Esther?_

_Oh._ He coloured. _Not well._

Neither of us admitted, then, that there were times at which we did not know _Maedhros_ well. For Maglor, his brother, and for me, his cousin and friend, it would have been an admission of crushing defeat—and we, like all our fool family, were proud.

Mairon does not return. I press my lips against my cousin’s temple, and gently, I rock to and fro, as if making myself a cradle for what is left of his limbs will serve to soften the vicious needs that await us.

I came here to seal the wound. Instead, I made another—a deserved wound, in a vicious face—but I wasted all my fire to do it.

_Not all. Not all your fire, doctor._

“Get up,” I say. I speak the words aloud because I need a command, and there is only myself to offer it. I am as close as a breath fogging glass to _it._

To death.

I could just as easily say, _I want death_.

And—if I wait here, holding him, death will come to us both like a man who climbs out from between corpses.

Death came already, and I fought it off.

_Again._

There is a glow to my left and a black maw of darkness beyond. Mairon is gone, but will he return? Less an eye, but with all the greater a resolve for bloodshed?

If he returns with even one other man—

“Oh, Jesus,” I say, which is not as much a prayer as it should be. I am hearing his foul words, _the branded one lies there_ , and I am weak in my stomach and my chest, at the thought of the only task that can save him. _The branded one…_

I cannot be frail and foolish. I cannot be ash while there are still embers.

I release Maedhros. I lay him on his back. His crooked chin lifts; his sunken chest heaves. He gasps. But there is no look for me, no gaze, no word.

The last thing he asked of me was that I run.

_Would you have had me leave you to that killer? What has he done to you already—he has cost you a hand, he has mutilated your features—_

But I will not speak those words aloud, lest he hear them.

When I have supported his head a little longer, so that he can breathe more easily, I rearrange my coat beneath it. Then I look to the stump of his arm, and inspect the makeshift bandage there. It is saturated and freshly warm. I tear at the inside of my cheek with my teeth.

Whether Mairon returns or not, we cannot leave this place.

To do so is to sign my cousin’s death sentence in his own steady-dripping blood.

Out of the darkness steps my mother.

She raises her hand to my shocked and yearning brow. The ribbons of white light that stretch from her fingertips are too soft a fiction, even for me, and I know that this is nothing but a fever dream blurring and deceiving my weary eyes.

Yet, here I am, waiting. Oh, how I thrill to my own falsehood, when she smooths back a wayward lock that has worked loose from its braid. (It is my hand that does so. A bloody hand.)

She says (she does not say), _Now, now, Fingon. You must not drive yourself mad._

(As if she is not a herald of my madness!)

_Get up._

I crawl towards the embers after I have reclaimed possession of my gun. The kindling that burned was scattered in the scuffle, and it grieves me doubly to see how faintly the bits smolder now. The dying scent of fuel in the ghastly, quiet air is yet another mockery of me. Of my would-be efforts.

Did I strike in needless anger, though? No, I did the best I could.

And now I _must not drive myself mad._

In scraping about for a plan and a little spirit, I realize how much I wish to talk to my cousin. I will have to blow on the coals, also, but in between that and the sundry motions of fire-building of the driest debris, I speak aloud.

“Well now, Maitimo,” I say. “We shall have you looked after in short order. This is as ugly a place as I daresay we’ve seen. But don’t mind it. Pray don’t mind it. A doctor can’t choose his hospital.”

I grimace. I keep on.

“I don’t know how angry you shall be with me. I shan’t begrudge you a speck of it. We weren’t supposed to be…here. I wish we could step outside of ourselves, and then perhaps we could have a laugh at what we’ve come to. Damnation, what am I saying? I don’t want a laugh.”

A little flame—leaps—

“I’ll have no choice but to—to curse myself, if my blathering causes us trouble. But there now, I sound like I suppose you did. After—after everything. Did you curse yourself? No, no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Maitimo. You needn’t answer.”

As if he could.

The flame has caught on. It grows. I thrust a little more wood there, and as there is no time to wait for a proper bed of coals, I unsheathe my knife and thrust it beneath the woeful heap of firewood. Then in penance for the risk I took in speaking, I drag myself upright. Standing, I feel no taller than I did when I was on my knees.

I pace to the entrance of this hellhole. The night outside has changed; the inky heavens faded to the muted softness of a grey cat’s hide. I pray an _Ave Maria_ , under my breath this time. I have nothing more to say at present, to my cousin.

He does not deserve the blunders of my incautious tongue or the relentless buzz of my unintelligible voice, if he cannot indeed make out my words and comprehend them.

He should be permitted to rest.

 _He has bled too much already. You know this. Every second is a second too late_ —

The knife, when it glows, must be applied flatly but briefly to the wound. To press it against the open flesh too long will cause deep and permanent harm.

 _Permanent_. A sob bubbles in my throat, and is twisted to a laugh. Is this how the monsters make their beginnings? Overwhelmed by the pain of hurts that they themselves are compelled to cause?

But no. No reason on earth could have compelled _anyone_ to speak of Maitimo as Mairon did. And what Gwindor hinted at—

 _Gwindor_. I wish for all the world that I had him with me. He is a stalwart man, and a sometime friend of Maitimo’s. Is not that what we need? A friend, a recent friend, who knows how to speak his language?

(See how I doubt myself.)

The corpses that remain do not stir. No more snow falls; the sky is clear. If I look out and up, I can see the pale and waning stars. The moon has disappeared, and stars, however faint, are ungenerous, for we no longer have the cover of clouds.

These hours are colder, fiercer. Hell is empty—

Still, the fire crackles. Still, I walk in caged circles and pray. My teeth chatter, for I have no coat. I gave it to Maitimo. I am hale, and but for a few stinging scrapes, I am unharmed. I will survive this.

As I walk, my boot strikes—something—that is neither corpse nor charcoaled wreckage. Something _rolls_ like the marbles Argon used to squirrel away in his little hideouts.

Stooping, wondering, I lift vials in my hands which I thought only hours ago that I would never see again. There, too, is my water-stained book of notes. I gasp; I wonder. Then I am sick with understanding, for I know that Mairon must have brought them. He was watching us long ago, and he must have hoarded these cast-off things, then bounded so far ahead of us that he had time to stow his spoils.

What he stole, I regain. By my strokes of fate, these things are mine again.

I tuck the vials in my pockets. The book, I keep at hand. I’ll need it, though not for notes. All my pen-scratches must live in my mind’s eye, or die tonight.

When I return to test the knife among the paltry coals, I find that it is not yet too hot to touch. Something that I _could_ call despair, but won’t, rises up in my gullet. It scorches my tongue, I fancy, in my shaking grief. Everything, even the stinging rebellion of my frozen fingertips, feels _warmer_ than this cursed blade.

I can’t keep watch. I cannot guard, because the fire does not grow hot enough to do me— _him_ —any good. I commend my once-precious notes to the flames, page by page. I would do anything for him, but I am capable of so little in black-walled Hades.

— _and all the devils here_.

I crawl from the fire to his side. My hands are clumsy. I lay one against his brow. He is fire himself; his fever does not fall. Infection had set into his ravaged hand. I knew that, when I amputated. That was many hours past, now.

The night fades because dawn is rising. I forget this. You see, in my grief, I forget everything. I do not hear any more voices; my mother does not return. _She rots, Fingon_ , I say to myself. _Remember that. Her body rots…and her soul, if you can still believe in souls, flies free beyond your reach._

Yet, believing in souls, I remain here, crouching, with my hand on his forehead. My gun, I returned to my belt. I chew my shivering lips.

My cousin cannot rest. It was a folly—no, it was worse than a folly—to believe that, chained to this body, he could know peace.

But if I had not come, if I had left him in anguish without hope—would that have been a better ending? Mairon as much as told me that he visited him with torment night after night.

_Water for the dog, he says, or at least he tries to._

I brush my hand down over his lips, which are parched as dry earth. Torn, I consider: is it wrong to give him water when it is Mairon’s vile words that put the thought in me? Will he know that it is Fingon who aids him?

“…ursed.”

The word is broken in two.

“What?” I force my hands not to shake him. I smooth his brow, and I stoop very low. “What is it, cousin? What is it, my—my dear?”

“Cursed.” He coughs, thinly and raggedly. But I heard him. I—comprehended.

 _Did you curse yourself?_ I asked him, worse than foolishly.

“No, no, you aren’t cursed,” I say, trembling both with the cold and with the knowledge of how I lie. How baldly I lie, to a broken body with only one hand to claim, to a face that is split and twisted and bruised! He was the pride of New York, my cousin Maedhros. He was beautiful and kind. He was haunted and beholden. I dragged his body home from a place, one of many, where he spent his soul. It was like us both, to deny the truth of that afterwards—to call misery a sickness, and endeavour never to speak of it again.

If I had been brave…if I had not been _little Fingon_ , and even more than that, if I had not cared so much about eclipsing myself for the sake of his recognition—

Would I have had a greater boon to offer than the admiration he deigned to hold so dear?

He is holding his eyes open with great effort. I see the strain in the swollen lines of his face. He does not force another word, but I hear, _cursed_ , again and again, as he stares up at me with animal intensity.

(The light is slipping in.)

His father is dead. His mother is gone. How must that have hurt him?

To Maedhros, Feanor was as the sun. Men of old worshiped the sun. They did not know that it was, to the rest of the universe, far from the greatest star.

Here is what the Fingon of even a quarter-of-an-hour ago did not know, or did not wish to:

If a knife will not bloom cherry-red with necessary heat, it may still have other uses.

That moment of weakness shall remain with me always, for I do not dismiss it at my own behest. I do not rally on my own strength.

Rather I am spared by the flight of a voice, ringing out from the world beyond. “Ho there! Fingon!”

I nearly lay myself out, fumbling for my gun. Then I realize that I _know_ that voice, though only newly. And I know the uneven shoulders framed in half-light.

It is Gwindor, and with him comes the dawn. 

There are manners which a man ought to keep, even in trying times. I feel my legs twitch beneath me, urging me to rise and greet our savior. Does Gwindor know that he is a savior? He must. He could not stand so tall if he did not.

But I cannot leave Maitimo, not even for a moment. I cannot release his shoulder or his forehead from my touch. To do so would be to abandon him forever.

“Please come,” I rasp, in answer to Gwindor’s greeting. “Please help us.”

He doesn’t run. He doesn’t move with that dreadful swiftness that Mairon did, when he leapt at me in the end. Gwindor picks his way towards us, through the ruins, the light trailing in after him like a faithful dog. When he is close enough to see, to really _see_ , he sinks down next to me.

His hand is on my shoulder.

“Red,” he says, not to me. He speaks in a reverent whisper, so close to a child’s prayer and yet unlike it—for no child can know this grief, and remain so. “Oh, Red-lad, what have they done to you?”

_What have I done to him?_

“He—he is very feverish,” I say. I am conscious of Gwindor’s hand on my shoulder, still. Very conscious of it, for I am confident that it is all that keeps me upright. “He is horribly wounded. They—they—”

I want to forestall him, you see. I want to tell him that I _had no choice_.

But he is too quick, and I hear his sharp intake of breath.

I wait for condemnation, for him to strike me. Instead he shuffles closer, on his knees, to Maitimo’s head. His hand leaves my shoulder, then, yet I do not fall.

Gwindor grips his knees. He heaves a horrible, aching sigh. Then he says, his voice all wrong,

“How did you find him?”

_Promise me you’ll forget me—this._

I never can. “They chained him to the rock wall,” I answer. There are tears in my voice, but I keep them in. I keep them from escaping. “They held him in a—a metal trap. The hand could not—I could not—”

Gwindor turns to me, a slow and painful twist of his neck. “So it was _you_?”

“What?” Only then do I perceive the obvious. Of course he would have expected such a grievous hurt to be done to Maitimo—to Russandol—only by those who hated him. Of course that maimed wrist looks like hatred, to a friend.

I withdraw my own hands, cruel in their wholeness of palms and fingers. I have no right to touch my cousin as I do. These butcher’s hands are gory, grimy, and still cold.

I weep against them.

“Get up, lad.” Gwindor growls in my ear. I startle; I shy away. Perhaps I expected to be slain by the light, since I changed the nature of my soul in darkness.

There, I am thinking of souls again.

“Get up,” he says again, more gently. “We ought to move him. I see the knife in the fire. I know what you’re about. Doctor Fingon, eh? Doctor Fingon, get up.”

“Oh,” I sputter, still tearful. “Oh, I—I cannot—”

“You _can._ I’ll stoke the fire. Clean your hands. He’s no more like to die if we cease to look at him than if we—if we don’t.”

The fire has not died. And nor should we. I push myself to my feet. I follow Gwindor towards the fire, but where he pauses to bank it up, I continue on, emptying the contents of my satchel on one of the surviving workbenches.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.” Gwindor rumbles. He is talking to keep his sanity in order, I suspect. How he came this far alone, after he swore he could not accompany me, I do not know. My only conclusion is that it is a testament to the heart Maitimo loved.

And what of my heart?

“No—no matter,” I say, bathing my hands and new bandages. There are very few left—enough to keep a fresh burn clean, perhaps, but no more. “I—you are here now.”

Gwindor blows on the coals. “It’s coming,” he says, abruptly. “How neat did you make it?”

I stand with my ready hands and the ready bandages held out in front of me, so that I do not soil them again against my filthy shirt. “I was able to disarticulate—that is, the bones of the wrist are intact.”

“Has he…” Gwindor falters. “Has he spoken?”

“Yes.”

“Does he know?”

My eyes swim. “Yes.”

There is a little pause, then. We cannot stave off forever the inhuman sounds of stifled sorrow.

“Enough of that,” Gwindor mutters at last, swiping at his eyes. “The knife is ready, doctor. Are we going to save him? I think you’re the man for it.”

“You don’t know that,” I warble, still watery.

“Enough of your lip. I do. I knew it in the forest, when we…when we parted.”

“You thought I’d die.”

“I did. But less often than I think it of other men.”

We return to him together. To Maitimo, to Maedhros, to Russandol. Three names, and one hand. It is like him, to be separated from everyone else by the world’s multifaced renown and his own dire losses.

I never knew that about him, in the days when knowing might have made a difference.

Together, then. I can see, even without my lantern, how much paler he has become. His eyes do not open, nor do they even quiver beneath their heavy lids. I hope he is lost to the world, for what comes next, though I know he may only be lost to movement, to strength.

Whichever it is, all is almost over; the thread of life nearly severed by my uncertainty, my blade, my wasted time.

Gwindor sits cross-legged behind him, and moving aside my coat, he lifts Maitimo’s head into his lap. Still: nothing.

“I hold his left down,” he says softly. “If he fights.”

If he can! Picking for the words as I might pick through bones, I answer, “He—he always—”

“Yes, he’s a right bastard, this one.” Gwindor’s voice is heavy with fondness. “He has more fight than sense. More _love_ than sense.”

And like that, I am freed from the spell of indecision. The knife glows in my hand. The wind from the mouth of the smithy-cavern joins us to the rosy daylight that replaces the darkness stroke by restive artist’s stroke.

(God answered my prayers, bringing me to Gwindor, and Gwindor to me, when our need stretched too thin to endure separately.)

(I ought to thank Him.)

I brace one knee against Maitimo’s hollow hip. I place one hand beneath his right elbow, levering the arm upwards. I bound a not-quite tourniquet between elbow and shoulder before departing the mountain, but now I fashion one in earnest. If it is in place for only a brief period, further deadening of the flesh need not occur. When this is done, I remove the blood-thick glove. I unwind the dark-stained bandage.

I expect another cry from Gwindor at the sight, but he surprises me by speaking aloud instead. His voice, low, runs as steadily and as desperately as the current of a river.

“The little ones are asking after you, Russandol. Not always with their voices, but with their eyes. They aren’t happy—I know you won’t believe me if I tell you that they’re _happy_ , just yet, but they’re well-fed. They’re sleeping. They’re safer than they’ve ever been, not a whip or a rough word to chivy the pair of ‘em. And Belle is beside them every moment. She’s resting well, Russandol. She can’t go an hour without speaking your name. The two of us has kept on for years, together, and you’re naught but an upstart newcomer, but we feel the gap of you. We do.”

The stump spurts and trickles. Some of the blood has congealed in darkened gobbets, but the relieved pressure whittles time to precious seconds again as the artery gushes forth anew.

“And here’s Fingon, your cousin and friend. He’s come back to you, stubborn as an ox, because he wouldn’t believe us when we said you were gone. You’re not gone, Russandol. I’m looking square at you, and I can see you’re not gone.”

Gwindor’s Russandol groans.

I heft the blade, and whisper, “Now.”

Gwindor’s hand clamps down on the left shoulder.

We are none of us alone, then, in the next eternal instant. We are not alone when the blade conducts its second act of ghoulish mercy. The scent is with us, roasting and searing. The sound is with us, pain upon pain. And I am weeping, and Gwindor is weeping, for we both of us love him too much to let him die.

_There now,_ says a boy to Maglor (the boy is me). _That’s done. He’s safe. Don’t call me back again._

_Promise—_

“There now,” Gwindor says, to a boy who would have sooner carved open his own heart with the knife in his hands (the boy is me). “That’s done.”

The body between us is limp, deathly, broken, but its breast rises and falls in shallow breaths. There is white cloth, now, where there was red.

The question I pose, following, is a selfish one. “Will he hate us,” I ask, “For what we’ve done?”

“If he does, I’ll swallow it gladly,” Gwindor tells me. He looks me fiercely in the eye, his body bent forward, curving over Maedhros’ upturned face. Gwindor is, as Mairon mocked, all grey—grey with memory and early age. “I had a brother, Fingon. And the brother is dead. They killed my Gelmir before my eyes. It ain’t the same as this. Do you understand? You didn’t kill your brother. Let him be angry, if he must. Drink your fill of it. Anger is a sign of life.”

I shut my eyes. My mother is gone, and my father—oh, I miss my father. I want him to hold me, to keep me safe from the man I chose to be.

“Come now,” I hear Gwindor say, far away, in my chosen future. “Let’s take him home.”

Outside the cave, beyond the forest, above the mountain—

The sun.


	9. the thought of their ancient friendship stung his heart

One could will the worst into existence by means of frayed nerves alone. There I was, more certain than I had been even five minutes earlier, that I _could_ _not_ play my instrument for my eldest cousin. My palms were slick with perspiration. Every joint was stiff—from shoulder to elbow to wrist. I didn’t know _why_ I had made my promise so boldly, two days ago, but now that we were seated in my father’s parlor, I did not know _what_ I had been thinking.

Blushing deeply (I had always gone red at the least provocation), I said, 

“I’m not any good.”

“That isn’t like you, _cano_ ,” Maedhros answered, his gaze swift and searching. “To speak ill of yourself. Now, I will not order you to play—Lord ha’mercy, I will not order you do anything—but I do hope you will reconsider. I am, you see,” he added, with a confidential grin that warmed me to my stiffened toes, “Quite eager to hear you.”

Why did he take such an interest in me? At fourteen, newly fiddling, I was so very _eager_ to understand. Yet, at the same time, I would have shirked from the discovery of any fact that suggested his interest was false. I would rather hide myself and my petty talent beneath the blindest bushel, than risk the shocking blast of unexpected derision.

Thus, I turned my chin up, determined to be brave and cowardly at once. The balance of the two was _forbearance_ , I supposed. _That_ was something my father had in his arsenal of uncertain virtues, and I could acknowledge the use of it—when he was not being stuffy and enigmatic.

The truth of the matter was, however, that Maedhros did not come to our house to visit Fingolfin. Forbearance or no, my father had no hold on him. Upon reflection, then, two paths stretched out before me: one horribly staid, and one very interesting.

Yet: the risk of pain loomed. If I tried _too_ hard to be interesting…why, I might end as I stood in that moment, with sweating skin and a design I no longer wished to realize.

“You have Maglor,” I said at last. “Maglor is the talk of the East, Mae—Maitimo, you know he is.”

I was still learning to call him _Maitimo_.

He threw back his head and laughed. But it was kindly laughter. I prayed with my whole heart that it was kindly laughter.

“Fingon, you’re a marvel,” he cried. “You have more humility in your little finger than I do in this demmed scarecrow body of mine, and more pride in your chin than Marcus Aurelius.”

I liked how he softened the curse, but confusion still attended me. “What have I to do with Marcus Aurelius?”

“I fancy the sound of his name.” Maedhros admitted, leaping from his seat opposite me and pacing the room with spades of his majestic swagger. He clasped his hands behind the tails of his new dove-grey coat. I was in awe of that coat, and he wore it splendidly. “So. You will not fiddle. Must I dance? If I danced, would you fiddle? The cobbler didn’t put enough turn in the sole of these shoes, I grant you, but if you’ll bear my clumsy footwork—” And then he paused, and laughed again, still more gently, and he stepped towards me so that I could not avoid his eyes any longer.

“Fingon,” he said, taking the cursed thing from my useless hands, “We are none of us Maglor. That is all his own doing. I love to hear my brother play, and were I to die, listening to the sound of his music, I daresay I should slip quite softly into the vast unknown that separates us from God in His Heaven. But I have not a thought of that music today. _You_ have been practicing a composition for two months, and you have told me of it, with such a bright shine to your eye, that I would be greatly remiss in failing to recognize how great an accomplishment _you_ have made.”

“Oh.” I blinked. He had such a way with words. If the fiddle were a gun, like the pistols that hung over the mantel, and he bid me shoot him in the breast—

Lord, I feared he would convince me!

“Play for me, won’t you, _cano_? And let me be your judge.”

Despair is rife with temptations; even temptations to hope.

With the wound sealed, and Gwindor beside us, I own that I am tempted to think our progress will proceed with ease from here onward. My cousin’s slumped weight will be as nothing, the weariness in my bones and Gwindor’s twisted shoulder will be as nothing.

Instead, we have covered very little ground before my strength fails and I am on my knees again.

“Let me,” Gwindor says. “I told you, you’ve done too much already. I can see it in your face, lad. You’re worn down.”

He saw the light wounds on my back, too, when he helped me with my coat. I am a little dizzy, I confess, and the pain behind my ear, where Mairon’s knife bit me, pulls the focus of my thoughts as a string draws a bauble before a cat waiting to pounce. The rising sun can give us comfort, but it cannot abate our losses.

“Your shoulder,” I say, thick-tongued. “You’re hurt—you’ve a bad shoulder.”

“It was wrenched out years ago,” Gwindor answers grimly. “But the masters’ whips never cared for that sort of thing. I can do my part, Fingon. I can carry him.”

I open my mouth to protest, and nothing leaves it but a puff of uncertain breath. I nod, and he joins me in kneeling, trying to pass Maitimo from my back to his without stretching him over the cold ground again.

My cousin is already too chilled, sapping all his strength with that damned fever.

 _Railing against it won’t do any good_ , I remind myself. Freed of his weight, I stand, my knees locking and aching. Then I help Gwindor to _his_ feet, dragging at his elbows, since his hands are holding Maitimo’s limbs fast.

“There, you see?” he demands, his voice strained. “We will get on very well, like this. Keep watch.”

 _Keep watch_ , he said, even before we left the cavern. I fall in behind him, with my hand on my gun. We haven’t spoken of Mairon yet—which is to say, he has not asked me whether I encountered a fight, or where I received my scars, and I have not volunteered any such account.

I would leave that fiend in the same darkness whence he fled.

Under cover of the forest, it is still night. The trees are black instead of rusty green. The wind is quiet, and what birds there are call out hoarse with longing. My stomach gnaws uneasily. I think it is the gnawing of pent-up fury, for, even with a staunch companion to permit me a moment’s weakness, I will not admit to _fear_.

Gwindor, shuffling and staggering, is stoic and silent. Nonetheless, he cannot see the uneven lay of the ground that runs ahead of him, and therefore we reverse our order: I lead and he follows. I feel out the knots of the earth, the secret roots and inroads, and I warn him when he must adjust his steps.

I am so tired.

_So tired, Father._

(Why am I thinking of my father?)

I lifted my bow to the fiddle, shot through by a prism of painful happiness. To be sought-after, in that moment, made me tremulously certain that our friendship was neither an incident of chance nor of guile. I was enough for my cousin. I began to play, and he did not laugh; nor even, I believed, did he breathe. I knew I wasn’t Maglor. At the peak of the most elegant flourish; in the timbre of the sweetest note, I _knew_ I wasn’t Maglor.

Yet, he marveled. If Maglor played the music of his death—distant, unimaginable—then perhaps, I reasoned, my humbler efforts would be the music of his life. Music to dance to. To laugh to, if I could stir him from his listening solemnity. This, at fourteen!

I was no artist. But I always longed to be one. Desires for beauty and hope were strong in me. The belief that, though we are born as lumps of clay tending to eternal imperfection, we could become something more, was strongest of all.

“Fingon.”

“Aye?”

“We—I’m slipping.”

I hurry to his side, and help him down. My hand flits also to Maedhros’ brow, and I find it no cooler than it was when we cauterized the wound. How long can one survive a high fever? I should know!

“Gwindor,” I say, “I believe we ought to—”

I don’t know what transpires next, in the cold unfriendly heart of the dim-lit woodland. I am, quite suddenly, staring at the treetops. My breath whispers above me in a cloud of mist.

“Beg your pardon,” Gwindor says. His arm comes under my shoulders. My shoulders! I have fallen, then—“But I couldn’t just drop him. Had to let you catch yourself.”

“Did I—” My head aches. My stomach is howling now, and I feel my limbs wrench away from Gwindor’s aid, though my mind scolds them for it. “Catch myself?”

He drags me upright, grunting. “No.”

With my right hand, I pat my sore skull. No blood. No _more_ blood, that is. My hair is sticky and stiff with it behind my ear, of course. “I am sorry,” I say, still breathy. “I—I am uncommon faint.”

Gwindor is not in my line of vision, but I fancy I can _hear_ him narrow his eyes. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes—no. No, I—when?”

“Lord a’mighty. The pair of you.”

Worried for Maitimo, I turn my head sharply. This hurts it, and I wince, but I am rewarded: I find my cousin. His upturned face is a smear of white in the unnatural fir-dusk. “There he is.”

“Yes, there he is, and too hot for anyone’s comfort, but otherwise no worse off.” Gwindor sorts through his pack, which must have removed from _my_ back, for I was carrying both his and mine a moment ago.

Maybe it has been longer than a moment.

He thrusts a little jerked meat at me. “Chew on that.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You are.” I _can_ see his eyes, now, and they are very fierce. “Choke it down somehow. Russandol can’t eat, but I daresay he should have some water?”

He is _asking_ me, because he thinks I am a doctor. I _am_ a doctor. “Yes,” I agree, weakly, “He should have a little water. If we can spare it, also, we should bathe his face—”

“That’s your province.” Gwindor nods, as if to himself. “I haven’t a watch, I’m afraid, but the sun is coming up. I seen it stabbing us through the branches with its little knives, and no doubt you have, too. By my guess, it is getting on eight o’clock in the morning.”

Can it be? A day ago—

He growls, “You’re not eating.”

Obediently—my father would be _shocked_ , even now, to see me meekly complying with the orders of anyone over as trivial a matter as breakfast—I eat the meat. It is sharp with salt, devoid of almost any other flavor, but I am used to _that_. 

“Water?” Gwindor asks, his voice a little softer. “Are you going to—”

_It is effort we honour—_

“Please,” I say. “Will you do it? I—my hands are shaking. I would waste the precious supply.”

(My hands are not shaking.)

Gwindor does not argue with me. (I am glad of this.) He tips his waterskin—one of Wachiwi’s make, I observe, from the yellow stitching in the leather—against Maedhros’ lips. Frowning deeply, he strokes two fingers on either side of his throat to help him swallow, as I instruct.

“Is it broken?” he asks me, in a low, dreadful voice. “His jaw?”

“I have not inspected it, really,” I say. “But—I think it is dislocated, not broken.”

He takes a handkerchief—also Wachiwi’s, for who else would have slipped one into my satchel?—and dampens it. Then he bathes Maedhros’ face very tenderly. I do not think I have ever seen any hands touch my cousin like that but his mother’s—

Or mine.

“I would hear it,” Gwindor says. “What…what has passed, since we parted. If you can bear to tell it.”

I think of the cougar, and its inhuman eyes, and then I think of Mairon, and _his_ eyes. I can hear his laughter, and his vicious words. How brutal men speak of women—how slave-masters, however pretendedly reformed, speak of slaves—

These are the only points of comparison I have.

I try to train my thoughts, instead, on the gentle sight before me. Gwindor is doing what I cannot. Maedhros thirsted for hours, because I recoiled from my duty. I recoiled from so much; perhaps I still do. Perhaps I never wanted to learn what daylight would show me. This, at least, I know: 

Alone, we would never have left that cavern.

“Let us make our way a little farther,” I implore. “It is not a tale to be shared beneath the shadows of these trees.”

“Perhaps you are right.” Gwindor glances behind us, his face haunted. His hand traces lightly over Maedhros’ bloodstained shirtfront. The blood there was dry when I found him, or damp only from the wounds in his hand, so I…I ascertained nothing further.

I tell him as much. Gwindor does not chide me. He nods, only, his head ducking towards his chest.

I wonder if he is as loath as I am, to _learn_. 

I carry my cousin again. The shackle on the ankle of his splinted leg strikes against my calf; another reminder of a hurt I did not tend to. I do not have Turgon’s hammer with me. I could not free him, even, from every restraint. As for the restraint I _did_ remove—

I put the fiddle down, and he applauded me, striking his hands together and smiling.

_That was capital, Fingon. Really capital._

A little forbearance is what I chiefly need. I do not expect to face Mairon again. As the hours pass, I believe more and more that the loss of an eye was like the loss of a life, to _him_.

(I try to forget that cats, by superstition, have nine.)

In the wild, animals that are maimed falter and die. They submit to the teeth and claws of their fellow predators. I could see that creature-knowledge in him, that glorification of strength and brutality above all else. Above all kinder instincts.

No: He had nothing to fear, so long as he could make other men fit within his order. What I did—maiming to save—had no place, no foothold, in Mairon’s mind.

I told him that I would never know who he was, within, and here I am reflecting on this! It is sharp justice, swiftly visited upon me for my rash words.

I am too weary to be ashamed.

The day grows a little warmer. Gwindor carries Maedhros again. We are both perspiring. I look for the buried stakes, the length of rope, but I do not truly desire to find them.

We are still far from the forest’s edge when we must stall. I am the bearer, at the moment; Gwindor helps me down.

“You should sleep,” he says. “I’ve your gun, and my own.”

“I couldn’t,” I tell him simply. “I do not believe I shall ever sleep again.”

“Nonsense. You’d die, without sleeping.” He helps me to arrange Maedhros in my arms. My cousin’s forehead, sick heat still simmering beneath the skin, is tucked against my neck. His hair is matted with blood and mud, and it smells like a dead thing. Nonetheless, I do not release him. I hold him as tightly as I can.

“Rest, Fingon. You’re failing fast.”

“And you are not?”

“None of that!” Gwindor crouches, his face sour in what is now unmistakably daylight. “We’ve a long way to go. We’re both spent ragged. He’s—”

“What had they already done to him?” I demand, suddenly. As if it is _fair_ to ask that, here. As if I do it for any other reason than to fight him as I used to fight my father. I rail against what is right, I think, when I can feel my heart breaking.

“What do you mean?”

I shut my eyes briefly. My father will be good to Gwindor, when we return. Better than I have been; better than I am. _Yes, Fingolfin, second son—you are the best of our family’s blood. You, and what scarcely breathes in my arms._ “I know that he was hurt. I know that—they are monsters as much as men. We need only look!”

“You said we shouldn’t speak of it here,” Gwindor reminds me evenly.

“You think this is _my_ fault!” My own words are indefensible in my ears, yet they leave my lips. “You think I—I—”

“I told you to sleep, is what I said,” Gwindor rejoins, sharper now. “But if you won’t do that, stay still at least. You’ll agitate the boy.”

All the fight leaves me. I drop my head, my cheek against my cousin’s filthy hair.

“You listen here,” Gwindor says, taking a little hardtack from his pack to accompany the meat he is about to force on me once more. “I’ve known him since t’end of summer. He’d already been with _them_.”

I know this. I keep quiet.

“I still don’t know the whole of how they used him. He was quiet. Skittish. You ever seen a young colt, Fingon? A foal, really, as doesn’t know its legs?”

I cannot see him, through my tears, but I nod. He can, after all, see _me_.

“Your brother was like that.”

“He’s my cousin,” I mumble.

“No, he’s not. Not now.”

That eases a burden on me, somehow. Eases one burden, and lays another on me. “Please,” I say, apologetic. “Go on.”

“He was good to the little ones. He bore up under abuse, docile-like. Slave-drivers love what they do, since it lets them keep away, in their own minds, from hating themselves. I was almost as bad, truth be told.”

“No!”

“I hated myself, and so I hated him. He hadn’t done nothing to no one. You know him.”

I did. Once, long ago, I did. His chest rises against my right arm. His face is made so ugly, by its twisted hurts. When a tear falls on it, it is almost a moment before I recognize it as my own.

“They whipped him, Fingon. Well, one in particular—Gothmog.”

“I don’t know that name.”

Gwindor snaps a bit of hardtack between his teeth. “Then I pray you never do. Gothmog was at him with the lash until he was more blood than body. All because he tried to save a life.” He huffs a breath that should not be a laugh, that should not even be the _cousin_ of a laugh—“ _Then_ I befriended him. Then I looked after the lad. _See_ , I says to myself. _Look what he’d do for anyone_. And I still deserve a bullet to the skull for making him pay that price for my help.”

I am not equal to answering, now. 

“I’m talking too much. At least the wood-beasts are sleeping, save one.” Gwindor shakes himself. “What I’m trying to say, afore there’s a goddamned dart in my neck, is—he mucked through all that. Through losing whatever it is that gives you that pretty little spring in your step. Through losing those fool brothers of his. His _father_ —damn me, what kind of father leaves a boy like that alone? I’ll tell you. One who can’t or won’t protect him.”

_They killed my Gelmir before my eyes._

I bestir myself. I do not want to look down at this body and call it Maitimo, but it does not matter what I want.

Gwindor tore himself free of his ghosts, free of his fears—and came to save us.

Is there nothing I can do for _him_?

With my left hand, I take the hardtack and the meat. A peace offering, accepted. Softly, I say,

“Mairon shall not give us any trouble today, I think.”

_Maglor tried to teach me the fiddle once, but I was—let’s say I was hardly a dab hand at it._

_Would you like to try again?_

_No, no. I’d like_ you _to._

“What?” And like the light that flings its gold and silver coins down around us, the branches and bracken notwithstanding, Gwindor’s face changes. “You—”

“Aye. He followed us down the mountain,” I say. I do not wish to compete with his generous confession; I have little to offer but this single comfort. I, who cut off Maedhros’ hand. “He lay in wait for us, at the forge. And then—”

I release a breath I did not know was trapped inside me.

“And then,” I say, “We fought, and I stabbed him in the eye. He ran away and left us, after that.”

It sounds quite simple, almost foolish, when said aloud.

But Gwindor is dismayed; silenced. His hands fumble; he nearly spills his precious water into the red-brown needles beneath us.

“You—you alone,” he says. “You…”

“Yes.” I had hoped to help him, with this news, but perhaps it was too much to swallow at once. “Yes, and it seemed to affect him—why, as you see, we have had no trouble since! Of course, that doesn’t mean we are _safe_ , but…”

“No,” Gwindor agrees, somehow seeming like a drowning man who seizes a rope thrown, “No, it does not. If—if you will not sleep, we should press on. There are many hours left in the day, but they will pass us quickly.”

_Spent_ , I think, my eyes falling briefly on my new friend. We are both spent, and the day will not be kind to us, nor to Maedhros. Gwindor risked words and heart, to steady me; I spilled many a word myself, in the night, trying to keep myself sane. Have we done right, and well? To answer that question I see my father again; his wisdom breaking my heart even when he did not force the truth on me.

 _Oh, Fingon_ , I say to myself. _You are a simple fellow. A little lump of clay, without talent or vision._

For which cousin did I bring that fiddle all this way with me? For Maglor—or for Maedhros? The day, dawning, is changing me with a gentler touch than did the night…but its touch is inescapable. I do not know the Maedhros Gwindor met, when he was Russandol. I confess that _Russandol_ is a creature both painfully near and terribly far. It would be like him, to be kind to children. It would be like him, to be brave even if—if he was whipped, as Gwindor said he was.

But to be shy and frightened? To endure abuse, without protest?

To be a murderer and a fiend, as I heard tell all the woeful way west? Yes, I must remember that too. Remember what I learned from loose women and hard-eyed men, about the copper-haired scoundrel with clever hands and a price on his head.

All this leaves me (he left me) with a question:

Who is my cousin now?

Gwindor called him my brother. To that end, I think he is Gwindor’s brother, too. Russandol is his Gelmir, living and saved.

When we lift Maedhros to Gwindor’s shoulders, setting out, we do so with gentle, inescapable hands.

Our hope is in us, yes, but his fever does not break.


	10. resolved to heal the feud

My grandfather’s study was a marvelous place. His desk was a flurry of disorder: covered in sheaf upon sheaf of ink-starred paper, unopened envelopes, and quills both fresh and used. The shelves that lined the east and west walls (as I called them), however, were orderly with shining books.

The walls were not _truly_ to the east and west. I merely thought of them so because, when I was very young and lacking in understanding as to the finer points of direction, I thought that whatever was directly in front of me (in this instance, the door of a room) was _true north._ Accordingly, the south was to my back, and to my left and right—

You see how I was a rather silly, suggestible child.

Some of the books were written by Grandfather’s friends. Some of them were not. Some were even novels— _but not like those penny-tales you might collect in a corner shoppe,_ he said, laughing his deep laugh. _These are_ real _stories, Fingon. You should read them all, in time._

I always intended to—and when I was somewhat older, I recognized the names on the gilt-and-leather spines—but Grandfather’s study was too sacred a place for a small boy to explore, when the man himself was not present.

There was one window facing the false north. It was a bay window, and the side-panes were filled with real stained glass, procured by young Charles Winston. Grandfather said Winston would someday have a great name in the art; I believed him.

I longed to press my cheek against those panes and see if it would come away stained red and green and limpid gold, but I did not.

More works of glass enticed me from the cabinet that divided the shelves to “northeast” and “southeast” of Grandfather’s desk. Behind plated cupboard doors stood bottles of amber liquid.

When the sun crept in, its rays already coloured, those bottles glowed.

I asked my grandfather, once, what the amber glow was made of, and he laughed again and wrung my cheek gently with a pinch of his long fingers. “Ah, that eagerness is the Irish in you, my boy!” he said, “But I shall hold off. Your father would have my head on that silver platter!”

And he pointed at a tea-tray, which one of the maids must have left behind.

I could never see that tea-tray the same way again.

This day in the study, the one that I recall, was a special occasion, for Grandfather asked Father if he could keep me for the afternoon. He wished, he said, to show me some books he had just received from Paris (the sort of thing that always pleased Mama to hear). Accordingly, the rest of the family left just after our Sunday dinner, and I remained behind.

Grandfather bade me be seated. There were no books, that I could see, amid the sheaves of paper.

My legs dangled; the chair was high, and I was still small.

Small, for eleven, which pained me deeply.

Father didn’t seem overly concerned, when I applied to him for justification. _Why did you make me so small?_ I demanded, and he frowned down from his great height and said,

_There is time, yet, Fingon._

Mama said that _she_ had been petite when she was young, as had her cousin Guillame. This was no comfort! I did not want to reach only Mama’s height.

Grandfather sat down on the other side of the desk, his eyes kindly diverted from my swinging, copper-toed boots.

“Fingon,” he began, engagingly, “Will you forgive me for my little falsehood?”

“What?” I asked, and then remembered the lessons my schoolmasters insisted upon. “I mean—beg pardon, sir?”

“No need to call your own blood _sir_ , dearheart. No, I’m the one on the back heel. I don’t have a single book to show you.”

“Oh.”

“I had…well, there’s a matter I’m wishing to discuss with you, Fingon, and it seemed best for the two of us to talk it over alone, like two men.”

The illusory books were forgotten. I sat up even straighter, my fingers curled round the leather seat. “Oh, Grandfather,” I cried. “I would like that very much.”

“Well, then.” He lined three quills up like sentinels or cigars, and then he flicked them away. “You remember your cousins, Maedhros and Maglor?”

Of course I did. The were older than I was—Maedhros was older even than Finrod, whom I saw more often—but we had made delightful games together as babies. Indeed, it was still a lark to see them at Christmas and, occasionally, at Easter, though I usually found my feelings bruised by the end of each visit.

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Your uncle Feanor believes,” and here, Grandfather steepled his fingers together under his chin, “That Maedhros and Maglor will be better educated in the City, than at home. He has asked—I have assisted, in a small way, to situate your cousins at a very respectable school. No more respectable than _your_ school, of course. Neither more nor less. But as Maedhros is fifteen, which, as you know, is not yet the age of majority, your Grandmother and I will be opening our home to them.”

I digested this information. It sat uneasily in my stomach, along with our Sunday roast. Uncle Feanor kept a home in Valinor Park, but he used it almost solely when he and his family came for holy days, or when he came alone.

When he came alone, he only saw and spoke to Grandfather.

And now two whole cousins, living in this house—

I wondered if they would be permitted to explore the study. I wondered if Maedhros, who had hair as beautiful as the stained-glass windows beyond, would have rights to the glowing amber also.

“Are you troubled, Fingon?”

“No—no, Grandfather.”

“Very good. Just as I hoped.” And he beamed so warmly that I thought he could be an angel, if angels were depicted as having a little silver in their dark hair. “Now, the reason why I wished to speak of this to _you_ , Fingon, is a delicate one.” He sighed almost sadly. “Your cousins are clever, sweet-tempered, friendly boys. It…it may not be my place to say more. You are very young, yet.”

“Not too young!”

“Really? Can I trust you?”

“Yes, of course.” Oh, I was eager to be trusted.

“There is a little unrest in our family,” Grandfather said, pausing between certain words as if he chose them with care. “Your uncle—Feanor, that is—is very sensible of injustice. This is a good trait, do not mistake me. He has a strong inclination for justice.”

I was swinging my heels, despite myself, so I stilled them.

“I do not want him to misunderstand…I do not want him to feel that his sons are ill-used by us comfortable New York folk. Do you take my meaning?”

I wished I did, but I had to shake my head. “Not exactly, sir.”

He forgot to correct me this time. Or maybe it _was_ proper, to call him sir when we were speaking of delicate things. “We are all accustomed to one another’s company. We dine together on Sunday, on Thursday, and oh, you know it brings me joy how often your father escorts you here to spend an afternoon in the parlor! Such is the boon of two houses, so closely placed. Your cousins—your northern cousins—have not the benefit of such an easy distance. For this reason, they will not know, at first, what it feels like to dine together so often. To play at the chessboard of an evening, or to spend a Saturday morning at the riverside.”

“You are afraid that they will be lonely,” I offered, helpfully. I did not want to appear to be inattentive, but when he said _northern_ , my eyes were once more drawn to the bright window.

“Not _lonely_ , exactly,” Grandfather countered. “No, if you knew Maedhros as well as I do, you would know that _he_ could not be lonely. He has a remarkably warm and sociable disposition. You shall like him as well as you ever did when the two of you were tumbling about in dresses.”

“I’m sure I shall.”

“Then you will be a good friend to them? To your cousins?”

It was difficult to imagine what need my cousins—cousins who _could_ not, it seemed, be lonely—would ever have for me. But I would not refuse my grandfather anything. Not here, in this favorite room, that seemed to hold his strength and light as well as that of the sun through glass.

“Of course, I should be glad to,” I said.

He stood up, rubbing his hands together. The broad lines of his shoulders relaxed beneath his coat. I rose, too, anticipating him, and I moved towards the door so that I would not be in his way when he came round the edge of the desk.

“Fingon—there’s just one more thing.”

I turned, my hand on the brass knob.

He sighed again, that sad sigh. “Will you—will you refrain, my love, from telling your father of this request? Don’t ask me why…I won’t trouble you with _that_.”

I blinked. I thought of my father, who, though as tall as Grandfather Finwe, was nowhere near as impressive. He fell asleep behind his newspaper, sometimes. He ruffled up his hair and made it stand in strange tufts when he was thinking. He was very shy when Mama tried to kiss him before us children. Of course, Turgon and Aredhel always squealed when Mama did so—but _I_ would think that a man would be glad to be kissed by his wife, no matter his children’s censure.

Not that I should ever know on my own account; I was going to be a priest.

A priest…a priest _oughtn’t_ agree to a lie, but—

“It is not lying,” Grandfather Finwe said softly. He was very wise, to read a thought unspoken. “It is _choosing_.”

“I promise,” I said quickly.

He hadn’t asked for a promise.

“Father,” I said, not three hours later, “Grandfather wants me to befriend my cousins.”

He had a book in his hands. It was not quite supper-time, but my brothers and sister were with Nurse. Mother, Nurse had told me, was resting in her dark room.

“Eh?” Father asked. “What’s that?” He had stuck his hair straight up again. It made him look almost as young as _me_ , save for his spectacles.

“Grandfather told me that Maedhros and Maglor are coming to live with him and Grandmother,” I said, folding my hands behind my back so that didn’t twist in front of me. “And he said I should be a friend to them, and that I shouldn’t tell you about it.”

I said it with a child’s cruel curiosity as to whether this truth was meant to hurt him.

I said it with a child’s innocent trust that it could not.

Father put the book down on the table beside him, along with his spectacles. He met my eyes levelly. I shrank, which wasn’t fair. I was already so small.

“You _should_ be a friend to your cousins,” Father agreed. “They will be lonely, I expect.”

“Grandfather said they would not.”

Father’s lips stretched thoughtfully thin. “Loneliness is a very personal ailment,” he said at last. Then he lifted himself from his chair, and gestured to the door. “Isn’t it nearly suppertime?”

I trailed him, discomfited. “I shouldn’t have told you,” I said, tremulous. “I promised.”

He paused at the door. Where Grandfather’s shoulders had eased, Father’s stiffened. I fancied I held the string.

“Do you want me to punish you?” he asked, sounding tired. “For breaking your word?”

I didn’t. Father’s punishments were not as fearsome as the sort of thing one read about in books, but I never _wanted_ to be punished at all. Still, I was going to be a priest. I should be brave, since I had not been true. “You could take away my pudding,” I mumbled. “After supper.”

Oh, the words were like lumps of lead on my tongue!

Father said, without turning, “You are very fond of pudding, Fingon, are you not?”

“Yes. Sir.”

He sighed. “Then I shall not take it from you,” he said. “Please go and tell Nurse that she may bring the little people downstairs.”

I hastened to obey, but I did not go at once to nurse. I hid in Mama’s sewing room and wept.

“He’s not dead,” Gwindor says harshly, beside me. “He’s not dead, Fingon, do you hear? Stop your bawling. Day’s fading.”

I cough and sputter, spitting into the snarled grass. I do not know what came over me just now, but I can admit that I am not myself. He seemed so _limp_ , as Gwindor carried him, that I insisted on a halt. We have no cover—we are in the open, shrub-dotted land—but I made Gwindor stretch him out. Then, shaking all down my body, I sponged his brow.

“Still warm!” said Gwindor.

“Only because he has not had time to go cold,” I sobbed, and I tried in vain to feel for a pulse, to test his breathing.

Now I am a mess of limbs and tears and spittle, of no use to anyone.

Gwindor’s hands on my shoulders are painful but steadying. “God,” he says. “I wish you’d sleep. He’s _alive_ , Fingon. He’s whining. Listen to him, if you will!.”

I force my own hobbled, wheezing breath to be still. I force it down with the aid of Gwindor’s punishing grip. Then I _do_ hear, how my cousin whimpers in the back of his throat, and I do see, how his chest rises and falls.

“Lord,” I whisper. “What is amiss—why am I—”

“You’re dog-tired, is what you are. You’re lightheaded, and sick at heart. Fingon, we’ve miles to go. He can’t last a night.”

“But he’s not dead yet,” I say, through my teeth.

Gwindor slaps me hard on the right cheek. “There you are,” he says. “That’s right. That’s damned right. He’s not dead yet.”

The mountain does not change; we do. We crawl like ants, and we cover a little more ground with every step. I am dogged by the past and the future both; it is the present that slips from my hold. Here we are, shaking off the snaking coils of dead grass. Here we are, ankle-deep in water. Here in the mud, each shale-stone is Maitimo’s face, staring at me from a silty grave.

No— _no_. Gwindor says it is not so.

My head aches. My stomach aches. Every muscle protests. My skin itches, where sweat has made a paste of dust and earth. It stings where Mairon cut me. Will the knife-marks look like whip-marks?

Will we be alike?

(I do not know, yet, the colour and texture of Maitimo’s scars.)

(I cannot even guess.)

Gwindor gives me water. Gwindor gives Maitimo water. Does Gwindor drink? Does Gwindor move as other men do, what with his granite resolve and his cliff-sharp broken body?

_Are you a man made of stone?_

_I’m flesh and blood. So are you._

_The pair of you—the pair of you—_

_Gwindor?_

_What?_

_I am tired._

_I know, lad. I know._

I come to my senses while the sky dies by fire. The sun leaps down into shining amber depths, and so it finds a home we cannot reach. My faith calls it heaven. I am transported, I am chastened. I am very lonely.

My father would understand.

My father—!

Maitimo (for I am calling him Maitimo again) is on my back, I realize. And, in so realizing, I have strength. Gwindor trusted me. My body must bear up more than my mind does. My mind may wander, but my feet are firm.

“How many more miles do you think it is?”

“Not many.”

That isn’t much of an answer. I’d scold him for his indecision if I had half a…half a spot of will.

On we go. Night is very soft. Soft as death can be, until its sharp-brushing edge.

I am going to die young.

Gwindor sings; Gwindor talks. His voice is as hoarse as an old crow’s. I think I tell him _that_. Once, we have to hide for a long while, until a dozen eyes have waddled past, dancing orange and golden. Gwindor says they are _torches_. Calls them a _patrol_. I laugh against Maitimo’s dirty hair, not understanding anything.

“I’ll take him,” Gwindor hisses. “You’re half mad.”

But I stand tall. I stand tall, and in time, the madness eases.

I see it, at last, for the madness it…was.

“Gwindor.”

“What is it?”

“I’m sorry. I was not myself.”

He is just a crooked shadow and a deep sigh. “You’ve returned, at least. That’s something.”

I straighten my body as best I can. The knots of pain are singing in my shoulders, above my hips, along my thighs.

“Gwindor,” I say, in my father’s voice, “You cannot carry him any longer, can you?”

“Don’t make me admit it,” he growls.

From then on, I am very much awake.

It is not easy to pray. Or—it is no longer so easy as it once was. I was methodical and calculating in childhood. I kept a little leather-bound journal of every holy thought that came into my head. They would find it, I reasoned, when they were considering my cause for sainthood.

After my plans to take the collar were put aside, I still prayed. Those were better prayers. Maybe I wasn’t such a bad sort, in my stripling years. Maybe my fervent pleas, my declarations of ecstatic gratitude, were pleasing to my patrons and my God.

_Let him live._

(He lives.)

_Let me save him._

(You have.)

Hollow, all hollow.

Gwindor seems to know the way. I am blind in the dark, but he goes forward determinedly, even while his steps drag.

“How do you know where we are going?” I ask, heaving out the words. I am steaming in my coat, though the air is chilly. My mind may be as clear as the stars shining out above us, but my feet have turned traitor. They are heavy and clumsy. They are, despite the furnace-heat of my body and my burden, cold.

“We passed the town some time ago,” Gwindor answers. “We are close, now.”

Close? What does it…what does it mean, that the mountain and the forest and yes, the river, yes the rolling field-land, are far off and gone?

It means the impossible.

 _Maedhros is dead_ , said Maglor to us; Maglor to me. Maglor alone had loved him with a love to rival mine. We not only desired to stake a claim on his precious time; we had the _chance_ to. We shared him in our city days, and we fought fiercely behind closed smiles. It was jealousy, therefore, that I looked for in my darker cousin, whenever we were faced by loss or pain.

But—

 _Maedhros is dead_.

Did it matter who loved him best? Whom _he_ loved best? There were only those words left in the overlong year of our breaking.

I could not live with them: those words. I could not die before I had set them to rights, or seen the truth of them with my own eyes.

At the end of this long road, I am still Fingon.

I am still stubborn, and not very tall (but that is how he would know me), and I still make promises that I cannot always keep.

Grandfather Finwe knew so little of our lives, though he knew very much about his own.

Despite this—despite everything, I considered him my first hero for a long, long time.

Black are the clouds above us, and golden is the sun that is gone. Golden are memories (mine) and red runs our family history, written in a Bible somewhere lost to the East.

My mother…my little brother…

My uncle, whom I could not really love.

My cousin, whom I never hated, not even once.

We smell the lake before we see it. I weep. Gwindor may be weeping, also, but it is dark. I will not ask him. I will not make him admit it.

There is another forest between us and our goal, yet it is little more than a thicket to men like us…men who have passed through miles of ruthless mountain trees. The bleak power of an empty hell lies behind us. Who could fear, having escaped that?

_Who—could—fear—_

Even if Gwindor could, I would not ask him to take my cousin now. I would not give Maitimo to anyone else, not even to a friend. _A little longer_ , I tell myself. _A very little longer, and you will have done what you set out to do._

There are lights through the trees. Muffled, hidden, but they _are_ lights. They gleam red and yellow both, because they are woodfires, made not for weaponry but for warmth. True, the unfriendly fort lies beyond—I know this. But, for the first time, protection is closer to us.

_Closer._

_We have come so far, Father, and we are still ourselves._

_Yes,_ I say to Maitimo in thought. _Yes, you too._

“We ought to call out,” Gwindor says. “Before the marksmen spot us.”

“How could they?” I demand, but then I remember Haleth. Beren. Finrod.

Finrod! A moment of the sleepless madness passes over me again. I shake it away. Maitimo’s breath flutters against my ear.

“Call,” I say, to Gwindor. “We are near enough that they can cover us, if spies or soldiers are near.”

Here the fire, there the eyes. They become one; they disperse. My body begs to be released. My knees beg for the earth to rise beneath them. I am one prayer, in this body. That is why my lips and thoughts can do little.

In plea, therefore, I will remain poised towards heaven. I will not fall, I will not bow. Not until I have made myself known.

_It is your_ cano _, and I am come to take you home._

There are voices on the air, voices that I imagine appearing in light as well as in sound—ringing down the ribbons of the hastening torches.

_Who goes there! What, ho!_

_Lord above, it’s Fingon! Fingon!_

_Father! Father!_

Is that Turgon? Have I another brother, who loves me still far more than I deserve?

(Of course I do.)

My cousins arrived with Uncle Feanor, by carriage, and brought (if the servant gossip is to be trusted) a dozen boxes besides. I did not see them, much less their boxes, for a week. Much to my disappointment, my family did not dine at Grandfather’s table on Sunday, or on Thursday, or on Sunday yet again.

I think this was because my uncle remained in the City.

But, in time, the week passed. Weeks were made of days, after all, and one day was no longer than another. I was often reminded of this, by my father, when I complained about the length of a given school day.

_Fingon, you shall be grateful for your learning, someday!_

When the long-awaited day finally came, we did not join them at the dinner table. Instead, we met them at the river, where, because we were the first to arrive, we loitered at the curving rail.

Mama kept Argon close to her, holding to his dress strings. He was six, and embarrassed at being treated as the baby. However, when he was very young, he was liable to run away on legs that were stout but swift. Mama was reluctant to trust him even now.

For my part, I felt grown-up and grand for no reason at all. Looking back on it, even within the same _year_ , I realized how much I was plagued by nervous worries.

I leaned against the rail, and tipped my hat back on my brow.

“They’re coming!” cried Aredhel.

And they were. Down the long, paved walk, I saw my grandfather’s high hat, being waved on the end of his gold-tipped cane. Turgon and Aredhel giggled to see him cut such a caper—and him a statesman!—but my gaze was fixated on the figures beside him.

One had dark hair and trailed a little behind; one had shining copper hair and walked boldly.

Beside me, Father was stiff and quiet.

He looked like himself, but that did not comfort me.

The torches light faces I know but do not seek. I stand, like stone, if I am fortunate; like flesh and blood, if I am not.

My cousin is slung over my shoulders like an offering. I wish it were not so.

Faces— _faces_ —

The torches part. The torches cast their many shadows. And here, at last, is my father, ten paces from where I stand.

_My father—!_

(I considered Grandfather Finwe my first hero for a long, long time.)

The river rushed; the boats chased the waves and the waves chased them in return.

I did not need comfort, then. I understood a great many things, and felt ponderous under the weight of them.

We were moving: Mama and Argon, Turgon and Aredhel. Grandfather’s voice carried on the breeze.

Here _they_ were: my cousins. We could not escape them. We never would again.

I took my father’s hand in mine, conscious that mine was still too small to be much help to him.

He held it tight. 

_Father, he lives_ , I intend to say. _Father, I saved him. He was lost to all of us, and I found him, and I cut him free. Father, you guided me. I have missed you, in the dark nights. I am sorry that I left you without your bidding. I am sorry that I risked myself without saying farewell._

But childhood overtakes me in my wracked state of exhaustion. Childhood overtakes my words, my hopes, my names.

“Papa,” I gasp, calling Father by the name I lost in babyhood, “ _Help him_.”

And I fall at my father’s feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to all of you for your reviews and interest. This was the fic that made me decide to try and reply more frequently. I love hearing from you, always.
> 
> More to come.

**Author's Note:**

> RIP Christopher Tolkien. This one's for you, whether you'd like it or not.


End file.
